My url for species to identify stopped working

[m_whitson]

Platform: web

App version number, if a mobile app issue: n/a

Browser, if a website issue: Chrome, Firefox (both on a Mac) and Silk (on a Kindle)

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?taxon_ids=51733,133292,156625,52602,56740,126547,132458,332253,47564,154830,244677,58334,72253,765587,55620,1065446,62852,48890,157646,181080,60246,126304,84364,48868,62811,133294,127899,75602,67577,361866,169540,62854,286387,278679,126869,130193,60879,72302,50616,156975,48602,431329,61369

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Description of problem:

Step 1: I have been reading the “how to use search urls” on the Forum and made myself a search for a long list of taxa to identify. I pasted it on my iNat profile so it was easy to find, and I’ve been using it for a week or so now. It worked great – whenever I wanted to ID some plants and not think much about which taxon to look through, I used this. I used it yesterday and it was fine, but today, it just gives me the identify page without any filters set, so I don’t get the taxa I wanted. What changed?

Step 2: Click on the formerly useful link to get a bunch of plants to identify (ex. oleander, castor bean, coconuts, papayas, etc.): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?taxon_ids=51733,133292,156625,52602,56740,126547,132458,332253,47564,154830,244677,58334,72253,765587,55620,1065446,62852,48890,157646,181080,60246,126304,84364,48868,62811,133294,127899,75602,67577,361866,169540,62854,286387,278679,126869,130193,60879,72302,50616,156975,48602,431329,61369

Step 3: Get the identify page, but with no taxa selected, so you just get whatever people just uploaded. This gave me my plants yesterday, but today it won’t work, and I haven’t edited my url or my profile recently, so what happened?

[jfmantis]

When I trim your list to only 20 taxa it appears to start working again, suggesting some change to the backend has accidentally added a limit of 20 to the taxon_ids filter.

[m_whitson]

So you’re saying I’m going to have to decide which ones to sacrifice… :(

I was afraid it might be something like that. I’m just puzzled as to why it worked 24 hours ago.

Thanks for figuring it out!

[larswillighagen]

I’m having the same issue with a URL with 20+ places: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=needs_id%2Cresearch&order=asc&taxon_id=47743&without_term_id=1&without_field=Multiple%20Life%20Stages%20-%20Nymph&without_field=Multiple%20Life%20Stages%20-%20Adult&without_field=Multiple%20Life%20Stages%20-%20Egg&place_id=7207,7008,8147,7506,6753,6718,7236,7016,8051,6857,6774,8227,7122,10282,10298,7020,8265,8050,8266,7800,7578,8267,8264,8263,7399,8057,10310,9213,8240,7599,7278,10290,6973,8228,8860,10302,8858,7147,8268,8859,8196,8505,10303,7094, which worked earlier this afternoon.

Edit: well, not the same, I get a HTTP 500 error and thus an empty identify page.

[jfmantis]

Before you change anything I’d wait a sec to see if this bug gets fixed quickly!

[m_whitson]

Good point. I’d just gotten used to using my link, so now I miss it.

[ncb1221]

As a workaround for now, you can make a list with the taxa you want to identify and search using list_id=

Keep in mind this method has the limitation of not being able to filter by taxa and the list at the same time. But if that’s not an issue for your case, the list method would work well. I have a list with over 30k taxa and it works

[richyfourtytwo]

I have the same issue, none of my ID filters work.

I don’t want to waste time on workarounds, so my IDing will be restricted by this to just some frequent species that I will look at manually for now.

[DianaStuder]

If the limit set to 20 is a deliberate change. If. You could rebuild your URLs with 20 at a time, or some logical sorting that works for you. But wait on a ‘bug’ reply.

[m_whitson]

That’s probably what I’ll do if this persists – make several “Species to ID” urls, each with 20 species.

[tiwane]

This is related to a small update we made yesterday and we’re working on a fix, sorry about that.

[pleary]

Thanks for reporting. This was related to a change deployed yesterday that included package updates related to a reported security vulnerability. That package update changed its default behavior in some unexpected ways (some context here if you’re interested). Hopefully these links are working again

[larswillighagen]

Thank you, that’s very interesting (and I’ll have to watch out updating qs in my own projects).

[m_whitson]

My ID url works again. The joy! The joy! :)

Thanks, everyone.