Platform:
Browser, if a website issue: Firefox
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Description of problem:
The main page for observations should not show observations that 404. I am not sure how often this happens because this is the first time I am seeing this, but it should be possible to check that observations haven’t been deleted before showing them on the landing page.
they do some caching of results. so i think it’s inevitable that you could end up with some things that have been deleted by the time you click on them. it’s also possible that someone deletes an observation after you load the Explore results.so then when you click on it, you don’t find it. so i’m not sure this is a bug exactly.
do you see this often enough that it’s a big deal? if so, maybe instead of showing just a generic error message, they could provide a more plain language explanation of what could have happened?
No it is not a big deal for me, its a very minor issue. Should I re-categorize this post as a feature request instead of a bug report?
I’m pretty sure the default results for this page (all verifiable obs worldwide) is only refreshed every hour, to reduce infrastructure load.
No, I don’t think so. Any thoughts on a better error message?
