Location accuracy newly missing from observations

Bug Reports
#1

Having just found out how to view which of my observations do and don’t have location accuracy recorded, I’m very confused and frustrated that seemingly almost half of my observations do not have their accuracy recorded. I manually input/edit the accuracy on every single one of my sightings so I am not sure how they have disappeared.

It’s not exactly an enormous loss that an individual observation does not have the accuracy recorded but it’s very concerning that the information seems to have simply vanished from so many sightings. Can anyone offer some insights as to what might have happened??

Looking at my observations which do have location accuracy recorded, there does not seem to be much of a pattern in which observations have been affected. The only noticeable thing is that only 6 (out of 2000+) of my sightings uploaded this year have had their accuracy vanish - was something changed in how the data is stored or something? My upload/input method hasn’t changed at all so I am clutching at straws a bit trying to work it out.

I will try to re-add it to the sightings from which it is missing but I don’t want to edit 2500 observations if it is just going to happen again!

#2

Oh no! That’s frustrating.

#3

i’ve noticed that if you manually input coordinates / positional accuracy on the observation edit screen and immediately click save, it doesn’t always keep the information. on that screen, you have to move to a different input box before you click save, i think… or something like that. whatever that process is, i always double-check after saving to make sure coordinates and positional accuracy have been saved appropriately.

if you input that information on the upload screen, generally i encounter fewer unexpected issues there. the only thing that sometimes trips me up is that if i’m editing multiple observations at once, i need to make sure to begin the edits using the left pane, not the observation cards.

EDIT: i just tried messing around with the observation edit screen, and i can’t reproduce the problem that i’ve seen in the past. so it’s possible that the problem has been fixed, although data affected in the past will still be bad.

Accuracy circle can be dragged separately from pin when editing an observation's location
#4

Thanks @pisum, I generally input from the upload screen but will definitely be double-checking everything from now on

#5

Are you certain the accuracy was recorded in the first place, or do you know that the observations had an accuracy value after they were submitted and eventually lost that value?

#6

I’m certain that at least some of them had accuracy recorded at some point because I have edited the observations from around my house a couple of times and double-checked that they’d saved. I’m not sure how long ago that was though and I don’t know about the other observations

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#7

I think that you might be right: typing in is not adequate: you either need to select a value (click) or move to another field.
Surely though, you can easily check this in the format that you are uploading your data?

#8

related discussion here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/location-editing-gone-very-bad/19082/7

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