Incorrect "Casual", no downvotes

Bug Reports
1

A random observation I uploaded yesterday from the Android app has been marked as Casual for no reason. There are no downvotes in the DQA, I didn’t mark it as cultivated, and if I use the Cultivated filter in my observations it doesn’t show up. This hasn’t happened with any other observations of mine (and I upload a lot of observations on the Android app).

Platform: Android
App version number: 1.36.8 (628)
URL: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/290454291
Screenshots: (taken via the website to show the DQA)

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2

Could it be because there’s no accuracy value associated with the coordinates?

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3

This is probably an indexing error. Try adding a DQA vote to reindex the observation.

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4

I tried marking as date valid and then unmarking and now it’s Needs ID. Seems to work.

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5

Something I uploaded two days ago randomly came up as Casual, too (in my case using the iPhone app). The plant is an invasive species but not cultivated, and an earlier observation of mine of the same species was not Casual, so it puzzled me. I decided to deal with it after I’d uploaded my remaining observations. By the time I finished with those and refreshed, that one was no longer marked Casual, just the usual Needs ID.

I assumed it was just some sort of temporary glitch but maybe it’s a slightly more pervasive bug, if it’s happening to other users, too, and possibly cross-platform.

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6

Hard to know exactly what happened (for example, did someone vote it as not wild, remove that vote, and the system didn’t register the vote removal?).

But please do add more examples if you find them.

3 Likes
7

This may be similar to something I have noticed. All observations of certain species in Connecticut get automatically marked as cultivated by iNaturalist in the DQA even though I didn’t mark it as such. At least one of these is American Sweetgum which is very much native so I’m not sure why it automatically marks as cultivated every time. You have to manually disagree in the DQA after posting to cancel it out.

8

This is probably expected, see https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000170240-why-is-inaturalist-voting-that-my-observation-is-not-wild-

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9

This one here also probably shouldn’t be casual: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/290454865

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10

This one by the same observer probably neither https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/290453332

11

I think this is probably what happened. I once hit the x-button by accident and tried to remove my vote as fast as possible, before the observation was even properly loaded in identify.

After that, I couldn’t remove the vote. The box would just immediately get checked again. Reindexing solved that issue too.

12

Thanks for the replies, everybody! Good to see that adding a vote and then removing it fixed the status :]

15

That happens to me sometimes as well when uploading from the Android app. Good to know that simply adding and removing a DQA vote fixes it, as my strategy thus far has been to very slightly crop the photo in the app and then re-sync the observation, which also solves it. It has only happened twice so far, so not a very reproducible issue.

And just to be clear, these are not observations that automatically get marked as casual, but some sort of bug, as all DQA points have green checkmarks.

1 Like
16

I found a few Casual observations last week that didn’t look like they should be marked as Casual. As soon as I added an ID they switched to either Needs ID or Research Grade. I wish I kept a list of them, but I am not seeing any today in my region.

2 Likes