Observation Numbers About to Go Up a Digit

99983932 at least!

Hopefully it won’t crash anything.

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Ah, the good old year 2000-bug panic comes back! Memories, sweet memories.

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Also at the current rate it is growing, I wonder how fast we will reach
200000000
I think it will be 2-3 years

@tiwane is the search mole your handiwork?

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It doesn’t go down. iNaturalist uses essentially the same URL generation system as BugGuide. Each new sighting gets the next number, and the URL assigned to a deleted sighting is permanently blank. iNaturalist currently has 95.599m sightings (of which 84.433m are verifiable and 11.166m are casual) out of 99.987m numbered URLs, meaning 4.388m sightings have been deleted.

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At the pace since no. 80m, it would take 810 days (2y 80d) to get to no. 200m.
Since 90m, 880 days (2y 150d)
Since 95m, 920 days (2y 190d)
Since 99m, 990 days (2y 260d)

99990000 is a cool looking fungus in Quebec!

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We have one. See this horrendously long forum thread: Funny, long, or just plain weird animal names.

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if obs ID 100,000,000 is reached today, then i would think it would happen while folks in N and S America are most active. while honeybees and lady beetles are quite popular globally this time of the year, monarch butterflies are still quite popular on the American side of the globe right now. so monarch would be my guess for obs ID 100,000,000.
…

it looks like observation ID is defined in the iNaturalist database as an integer datatype, which means that the maximum allowable positive value should be 2,147,483,648. that’s still a long way to go from 100,000,000, but with observations growing each year by about 150%, we should reach that max around 2029.

some other integer IDs will max out sooner than that though:

  • identifications are already above 200,000,000 (which would imply max out in 2027)
  • notifications are already above 1,500,000,000 (but hopefully this is already being addressed as part of the notifications revamp, and you could probably just restart the sequence in the worst case since notifications get deleted after a certain age)
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What would happen after max number is reached?

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Negative observations from the land before time?!

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any attempt to add to the table with the maxed out ID would fail. in a table where data is periodically purged (ex. notifications), you could just restart the ID from 0, but in a table where data is not purged (ex. observations, identifications), you would need to change the tables to use a datatype that accepts larger values like bigint, which maxes out on the positive side at 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.

that said…

i’m guessing that in the long term, iNat will probably shift more and more to using a UUID (which already exists alongside the numeric ID in most cases), though it’s not clear if / when the numeric IDs will be eliminated.

if this functionality doesn’t already exist, then as part of the iOS / Android codebase merge, you should gain the ability to see ID and UUID on observation pages in the app, since the Android app does show this information at the bottom of the observation information tab.

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However it’s done, the number (or perhaps eventually, an alphanumeric) associated with a record should remain unique and unchanged from the time when iNat began. I come from a museum background and catalogue numbers for physical specimens are an important piece of organizing a collection in perpetuity. I view an iNat photo record as essentially the same as a physical museum specimen.

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99999000 is also a Canadian fungus, this time in Ontario! Don’t count Canadian fungi out…

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99999900 is a bird in spain

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Anyway this is the closest I got https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/100000125

It is a bur marigold from a well established user from Ecuador!!

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/100000000

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I tried to cheat but failed by 261 observations :(
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/100000261

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Perfect!