observations which I’m sure I uploaded three years ago from Turkey have repeatedly been lost. Has this happened to anyone else? Is there anything that can been done about this?
Can you give more specifics? Maybe you actually have more than one account?
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For Bug Reports, please fill out the template provided when you make a new report. Without this information, there’s really no way to provide detailed help or investigate an issue.
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I’ve noticed some of my observations (from USA) disappear shortly after recording them, then reappear 5-10 minutes later. I assume it’s a caching or eventual-consistency issue on the server side.
Sometimes when I search for my older Observations I do not find them, because Identifiers have corrected that it is not ABC bee it is XYZ bee or even bumped it all the way back to a higher family or so. (Once I searched ages for something I knew was a Beetle but had subsequently been identified as a True Bug.)
If you do not find a particular insect or plant for which you are searching, my suggestion is to widen your parameters. (Insects or Flowering Plants feels about right for me.)
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…or search your observations by a date or date range or a general location (county, state, etc.).
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Sometimes this works! But only if you remember somewhat accurately when you saw something and roughly where and it has not been identified as a species that is automatically obscured. Often I find I am mistaken about when I saw something, especially if it fell during the pandemic.
Your method is definitely better for volume Observers, though. But for me, with less than 5000 Observations total and the OP with (I think @DianaStuder said) 500 observations in Turkey, it would not so many to go through by “Insects” or “Flowering Plants” etc. depending on what Observations they were specifically seeking and not finding.
Random aside: I do not think Turkey utilizes counties. Many countries do not. (We do not have them here.)
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We did recently fix a bug that prevented observations with tags that had some Turkic diacritics from being saved. Perhaps that’s what happened? But as others have said, without specific details (what does “have repeatedly been lost” mean, for example), it’s almost impossible to diagnose a bug. That’s why we ask people to fill out the bug report template when filing a new bug report.
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To get to the bottom of this, I think you need to explain what you mean by “repeatedly”. Do they reappear and disappear over and over? Or have you (re)posted the observations multiple times, and each time they have disappeared? Or something else?
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This happened to me to. Just noticed all my uploads from Nevada/Arizona that i took around 5 years ago are missing. Just gone. Like they never existed. I know some of the exact species I saw there, but searching for them under my obvs brings up nothing.
I’ll fill out a bug report or whatever, but the iNat app developers clearly need to do better with their app. The fact that multiple people are experiencing this problem is not good. Fix your app, iNat.
it’s not whatever. providing proper details is the only way to allow others to actually understand and research the situation, unless there are mind readers on staff or in the community.
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I have also had old observations of mine from around when i first joined iNat 2018-2019 completely disappear. I don’t have any specific examples, but with the ones that were lost(I.e. seemingly never existed) i was 100% sure i had uploaded them, because there was discussion on some of them. I just figured I was mis-remembering and I never uploaded them, so I reuploaded them the same day i realized they were missing(double checked to make sure none of them were duplicates- and they seemed not to be).
I’ve always assumed this is just something that happens occasionally with old observations that I never really thought too much about it in regards to making a bug report
Edit: This happened to me in either 2022 or 2023, so not recent, but just adding my experience to convey how long this might have been going on.
This is what I mean. I think in your case, @bugjams , it is possible you may be misremembering your date, because you have been on iNaturalist less than four years.
This is not a criticism! Especially during the pandemic, time seems distorted.
There is an Observation from you made on 12 July 2021 and uploaded 13 July 2021 in Arizona (an Observation made on 11 July you were in Colorado). There are no further Observations until the 25 July which has no location but you said in a comment it was found in a NY lake.
Do you think the Observations would fall in that range? If so, this may be helpful for the bug report.
In my opinion they have done a really good job, especially for a free-to-use application, so I hope you will continue to enjoy it.
Welcome to the Forum.
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I responded to your email about this three days ago, asking for some specific observations you think you made during that trip, but haven’t heard back yet. Being able to fix a problem means knowing exactly the what the problem is, and to do that we need as much specific detail as possible to investigate the issue.
In my experience, the most common cause of “disappearing” observations is not that the observations have been deleted but that the observer owns multiple accounts and the missing observations belong to another account, one they may have created accidetnally. Without being able to search for a specific observation regardless of which account created it is the best way we can check this. So knowing an area, a taxon, and a date range is key.
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