Platform (Android, iOS, Website):
Phone, don’t know o/s
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
This shows the large number of casual observations being created because of missing obs’ date, unknown to the observer:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=any&quality_grade=casual&place_id=6899
Description of problem
Many people are having problems with posting observations from their phone.
THE OBSERVATION DATE IS MISSING.
They think it’s there, but looking at the above link you can see many great observations are marked as casual.
I’m sure we are loosing new members because of this. I don’t usually see casual records and so don’t id them for people. Most other id’ers are the same.
I suspect it’s a localization issue (ie Australian Date vs American Date format)
Because I don’t use a phone, I haven’t experienced the problem but see it and try to help people resolve their issues, but some of them get really narky … so I don’t do it anymore.
Cheers
Brett
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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Android app double posting
Thanks, @ellurasanctuary. We have filed an issue for this which is known to affect observations from both iOS and Android from the Adelaide time zone if the user does not have a time zone set on their account.
What happens in this case is that the mobile apps are recording the observation time, which you can see if you look at the json view of an observation and look for observed_on_string but it’s not being correctly interpreted. e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/39567037.json for https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/39567037
So the good news is that the data is there.
Note: if you see a big block of text on the json page, you may want to install a browser extension that nicely formats json data and makes it much easier to read. e.g. search for “json formatting extension” or similar.
This may be happening in other places too. If you suspect other instances of a missing date bug from outside the Adelaide time zone, please check the json view to see if there is content in the observed_on_string. If so, please post links here to individual observations.
Housekeeping note: the other replies on this topic were describing a separate bug specific to Android so I am moving them to the relevant thread.
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Thank you Carrie.
If I read the “issue” link you posted above, Kueda has fixed this issue by adding the Adelaide time zone.
That’s awesome!
Thank you so much :-)
Cheers
Brett
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Sorted in time for it not to be an issue during CNC this year… whew!
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