I made my identification as part of uploading, and the timestamp matches the observation submit time. hawksthree’s identification has a timestamp that is somehow earlier than the observation submit time.
hawksthree’s comment about the identification order strangeness seems to have a reasonable timestamp, but then my reply comment has a timestamp that is prior to the observation submit date.
the observation submit date is 2021-02-07 11:56:51 (-06:00).
here’s what the identifications / comments look like with timestamps and IDs, in order as they appear on the observation detail page:
Displayed Order
Expected Order
User
Timestamp
Item + Sequence
Details
1
4
pisum
2021-02-07 11:28:10.628 (-06:00)
Comment #6287954
strange. thanks for pointing that out and for the ID.
looking at a sample of identifications within a range of IDs that occurred during the same time period as the examples above, i would expect the identifications to be effectively sorted by datetime when the IDs are sorted, but that is not the case. there are occasional cases when an identification’s timestamp appears to be off by about 18 minutes vs its ID neighbors. see: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications.html?id_above=153827846&id_below=153828406&order_by=id.
i doubt that the timestamp on these kinds of things is based on the time from each person’s device. it would make more sense for that to come from servers.
if you look at my main example, you’ll see that the time is right for my identification but not for my comment, and vice versa for the other user. also, it’s not every observation that has this problem, even though the same user identified multiple observations of mine from the same set. so if the time were coming from a local device, i would expect the times recorded to be consistently wrong or consistently right, and that’s not the case.
it seems more likely that either multiple servers / processes are picking up the requests and their clocks are out of sync, or maybe the code is doing something strange when it records the timestamp.
i don’t have a good way to query for cases where the identification datetime is earlier than the observation create date, but from my limited sampling, it looks like the issue seemed to happen between about 11:30 AM and 12:30 PM CST on 2021-02-07. i couldn’t find examples at other times a few hours before or after that time period, and i couldn’t find any examples during that time period on the previous 2 days either.
I got an incorrect observation date and I cannot fix it in Edit mode. I am using the web UI with the latest (Chromium-based) version of Microsoft Edge browser. I open the observation, click Edit and enter the corrected date and time as in the example below that field, Save the observation, but the Observed date and time do not change. Clicking Edit again shows my corrected date and time, but it does not show on the regular Observation view - it still shows the old data.
the thing you’re reporting sounds like a translation issue, unrelated to what i originally reported. you may want to log your issue separately.
this also sounds like an issue unrelated to the original reported issue. you may want to log this separately. you might want to try changing the date/time on another observation to see if it’s isolated to only one observation or if the problem occurs for any observation. based on what you’re describing, i’m guessing you’re probably inputting an invalid datetime.
looking at https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations?id=69629216, it looks like you’re inputting an invalid datetime: "observed_on_string": "2021-02-13:13:50:45". (replace the : between the date and the time with a space.)
i haven’t noticed any other cases, but i haven’t really been looking. you all would probably be in a better position to see if it is still happening, since you can probably query the database for observations with identifications timestamped before the observation create datetime.
sounds reasonable, but the thing that doesn’t really make sense to me is why only some of the observations, etc. created during the period were affected…
