Observations not being added to project

For the last few weeks my observations seem to be not appearing in ‘Festival of Nature: Bristol & Bath City Region Recorders’ even though they are within the boundaries of the project.

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do you mean this one? https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/festival-of-nature-bristol-bath-city-region-recorders

Yes. I left the project and rejoined to see if that would fix it but now all my observations in the project area are no longer in the project.

Also I’ve noticed a lot less observations appearing in the project lately so it may be that other people’s observations are not appearing either.

Looking at one of my observations inat is saying that it is in three projects but only listing one project. Example -‘Green Lacewings’ on 20/01/20.

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The project is a traditional project, which means that observations have to be manually added to it. If you’d like the observations to be added to the project automatically, you can contact the admin of the project to see if they would like to convert it to a collection project. Here’s a handy link about managing projects: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/managing-projects

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So that would suggest that the project admin has stopped adding observations recently?
The observations that disappeared when I left the project are now back after rejoining suggesting that this was just a case of waiting for a refresh.

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If observations used to be automatically added, then the project might be an older one. before collection projects existed, I think there was an option for observations to be added automatically. The iNat admins may have left this option on projects that already had that functionality, and it’s possible there’s a bug with it now. The admins are unlikely to fix bugs in the auto-aggregator (I think that’s what it’s called?), because it’s older functionality and collection projects do the same thing with a much lighter load on the server (@tiwane is that right?)

It’s possible that the auto-aggregator is working on that project, in which case I’m not sure why some observations aren’t being added.

Weird happenings! Over 1500 of my observations were in the project now it’s only 1378.

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This project does use the “aggregator”, which runs every 15 minutes or so and adds relevant observations to the project - relevance as determined by the projects terms and rules. It looks like the end date for this project was December 31st, 2019, so any observations with an observed on date after that won’t be added to the project. So I don’t think this is a bug, it’s working as designed.

And yes, @alexis_orion, traditional projects using the aggregator were grandfathered in, but it’s not possible to use it anymore because it puts a lot of stress on our infrastructure.

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OK thank you for the explaining the end date, I had wondered about that. I tried to contact the project admin but had no response. With the 2020 Nature Challenge coming up it may be that somebody looks at it as it says it was set up to collect observations in the Bristol area from the 2018 challenge onwards. I’ve just been using it as a good place to see what’s being recorded in my area. There is another project that covers part of the area - ‘Wildlife of Bristol’.

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I should note that depending on your goals, having a project is often not necessary. What does having a project accomplish for you in this case? I should say I’m not against projects, I just want to be clear that they are not necessary for much of iNat use.

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