Observation halting upload

Bug Reports
1

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):

iOS

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

3.2.8

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

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

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

IMG_4054
IMG_40541169Ă—202 24.7 KB

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: Make observation on app

Step 2: Watch the speed of upload

This is reoccurring but isn’t necessarily consistent. Basically what’s happening is I will make an observation on the app, and it will have the bar, faded, as if it will fill in to indicate the observation is uploading, but it will just stay faded. Sometimes it will upload without the bar ever filling up, but mostly it requires you to close the app out entirely and then reopen it for the observation to upload, because it will just sit at the faded bar doing nothing. It’s happened probably almost 10 times and is very easy to workaround but I suspect it’s not meant to be working this way.

2

I’ve also had it happen with wifi and without wifi. I think it’s definitely something on the app’s end rather than my phone because I tinkered around with it quite a bit and it still ends up happening. I’m wondering if maybe after uploading X amount it starts slowing down and that’s what’s doing it or something.

3

This might be completely unrelated and if so, I could make another bug report but I started noticing this at the same time as what I already did a bug report for. The observation number doesn’t always go up and sometimes I have to scroll the page up for it to refresh and then the number will change. I actually might make a bug report but I’ll check if anybody else has first.

4

If possible can you please share a screen recording of this? You can send it to help@inaturalist.org if you don’t want to make it public.

Instructions for recording your screen: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207935

5

I should be able to. It’ll give me a reason to work through the observations I’m putting off uploading, anyway…

1 Like
6

So, first try and 2 of the 3 things I mentioned happened. 1. The bar didn’t ever fill, but it did ultimately upload on its own. 2. The number didn’t go up by itself and I had to refresh it.

I think I’ll have to send the videos via email because I can’t figure out a way to do it on here. (I sent an email.)

I’ll keep recording to see if I can catch when it “halts” like mentioned before.

1 Like
7

Thanks, I got the recordings.

Yeah that was weird. Are you uploading a bunch of observations in a session?

I don’t think this is a bug, although to be honest I don’t usually look at the obs count when I upload. I think the app needs to re-fetch the obs count from the server. Same thing happens when uploading an obscured observation, as you’ll see in that second video. The app will show the actual locality note at first (like a street address), but once you refresh your obs feed, you’ll see the new public locality note because our server has to come up with the obscured locality note (eg for me, California, US) and then send it back to the app when the observations are refreshed.

8

Sometimes yes and sometimes no. It will do
this on and off in both instances, though.

Maybe not an actual bug but it’s new for me, at least. Normally the number would go up on its own and just take maybe a second to do it. Now it won’t go up at all automatically for me unless I reload manually. Which isn’t really a problem for me, I just think it’s probably not meant to be doing that.