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.
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: Filtering observations needing ID to older than a few months . To replicate, the buggy observation is Observed: Aug 22, 2021 · 5:14 PM MDT; Submitted:Aug 23, 2021 · 2:22 PM AEST
Step 2: I expect to find fully unidentified, ID withdrawn, placeholders with no matching entry in iNat, users opted out of community taxon without providing their identification.
Step 3: On a couple of occasions I found an observation with a valid ID but the observation is still unknown. If I enter my own input, it becomes something (I would ID this one as fungi including lichen and I expect it becomes “kingdom fungi”).
And so it happened - meanwhile another user added an identification, and it became kingdom fungi.
With the link provided in “step 1”, I tried to find more such issues: the number of comments and identifications is shown. But … all three observations with non-zero identifications I checked are from the categrory “users opted out of community taxon without providing their identification”. So no fresh example available…
This just happened to me three times while identifying Unknowns. I came across observations that had an ID already, but they appeared as Unknown. The first time I thought that the observer must have opted out of community taxon, but that was not the case, and it wasn’t just Identify lagging behind because they continued to show Unknown on the observation pages. I added an additional ID to each of the first two, which fixed the problem. I’ve decided to post the third one here instead of identifying it, for now. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/223459524
Looks like an indexing issue, probably hard to track down and maybe not something systemic. Faving and unfaving the observaiton on our test site added the genus ID to it.
