My project's statistics don't seem to be updating

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/south-mountain-reservation

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
On the overview page for this project, the statistics for “number of observations” and “number of species” don’t match what I see when I click the “View All” buttons. I noticed because my own stats for species observed have been stuck at 299 for weeks, even though I’ve observed a few new species in that period.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Can you share screenshots and further explain the discrepancies you are seeing?

I see the same thing - no discrepancy. Maybe an issue with local caching?

Your second screenshot is what I also see when I select “Observers” from the project home page, and it agrees with the stats on the Overview page. I see this at
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/south-mountain-reservation?tab=observers

When you select the “View All” button from the "Most Species " section of the Overview page, however, this takes you to a page that shows different stats,
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=74470&ttl=900&place_id=any&verifiable=any&view=observers

For what it’s worth, around a week ago I exported all observations from this project, and found that ‘tpollard’ had 306 unique 'taxon_species_name’s among those observations.

I have tried clearing my browser’s cache, and it didn’t change what I see on these pages. I see the same things when I view these pages from different computers, as well. My suspicion was that you’re doing some kind of per-project caching on your servers, and that’s what was not being updated.

i think there’s probably different handling on different screens for counting species from obscured observations. here’s a similar discussion from back in the day that might be related: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/species-showing-in-project-observations-but-not-counted-among-species-when-trusted-with-hidden-coordinates/28283.

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I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I only have three obscured or private observations out of the 1141 total observations I have in this project, and the latest of those was made a year ago. I noticed this issue because I found a few new species this spring and summer, but these didn’t show up in my species count in the project stats.

Can someone say what query it is that is used to produce the stats on the project overview page? (It’s not apparent in the URL, in the way it is for the page whose screenshot I shared.)

Can someone from iNat comment on whether project stats are cached on the servers or not? (It would be reasonable for that to be the case, since iNat probably wants to avoid repeatedly running expensive aggregations on large projects.)

bouteloua’s screenshot shows what others see: 1134 observations and 299 species for you. you can verify this if you view things while logged out.

the only reason i can think of why there would be a discrepancy between what you see (when logged in) and what others see is geoprivacy. remember that there are two types of geoprivacy – geoprivacy that you apply yourself and geoprivacy via taxon setups.

2 Likes

It looks like you’re right.

As I mentioned above, I see exactly the same thing bouteloua saw when I view the Overview page, whether I’m logged in or not - it was on the other page (whose screenshot I shared) that the correct stats showed up. When I log out, the stats on those two pages agree.

Maybe there were changes to the taxon geoprivacy of one or more species over the period where I was adding new species, and that made it look like the stats weren’t updating in the way I expected?

Anyway, I’m satisfied now that the stats do seem to be updating. Thanks for helping me understand how this works.

5 Likes

time to close the thread?