Original topic title: "Taxon name change dropped 2 ID's, failed to update". Added: "disagreements dropped during taxon name change"

Bug Reports
1

Edit: Part of the problem resolved when the update finished, but it still remained incorrectly at “Cope’s Gray Tree Frog” instead of “Gray Tree Frog Species Complex” until I withdrew my ID and reentered as a hard disagreement.

Platform: Web (but possibly across all)

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

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/167799105

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Screenshot_20260215-233316~3
Screenshot_20260215-233316~3720×627 98 KB

Screenshot_20260215-233614
Screenshot_20260215-233614720×1520 198 KB

Description of problem:

Before the genus name changed from Hyla to Dryophytes this observation was at “grey tree frog species complex” as it should be. The sequence was.

1st ID (Maverick) to Cope’s

2nd ID (Hard disagree) to Species Complex

3rd (my own) to Species Complex

4th (already withdrawn) to Gray

5th to Species Complex

Observation was research grade at species complex because I had marked it “cannot be improved.”

With the taxon change, the 3rd and the 5th ID’s were not re-entered by iNat, and are both now showing as “Maverick” and “inactive taxon” but without being crossed out. The 2nd ID has been re-entered but not as a disagreement.

This has resulted in the incorrect observation taxon of Cope’s.

I know I could help fix this by withdrawing and reentering as a hard disagreement, but wanted to create this report in case the issue is wider spread.

Loss of hard disagreement following taxon swaps
2

When you click on either taxon change, this text is currently displayed at the top:

Taxon change commit may still be processing so be aware that some records aren’t yet updated

3 Likes
3

Oh I didn’t know about that. Thanks for the explanation. Guess this can be closed then, if you’re sure it isn’t a bug.

4

Except that it seems to have finished now, and (as I suspected might happen, based on very limited previous experience) the disagreement seems to have been lost. So while all the IDs have appeared, you’ll have to re-disagree. Does that count as a bug? It’s certainly not acting in the way it should…

1 Like
5

I agree that the current CID seems like a bug. The “Good as Can Be” box is also now greyed out due to the recent change in how this works, so someone will need to hard disagree and then check the box to return the observation to RG at the complex level (which would be correct). If this has happened over all the H. versicolor complex observations, it will be a ton of observations to correct manually. Aaaaaaaannnnnnnnnd it has:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?taxon_id=1668899

1190 pages of observations that need to be re-IDed. Probably worth seeing if there is a programmatic fix…

1 Like
6

Oh noooooo! I for one will not be going through all 1190 pages of them, and I feel so bad for anyone who did do a large portion of that work the first time, only to have it erased.

Do you know if staff are aware of the problem? I could go back through all observations for my county, but if it might get fixed across the board I will hold off for now.

I have corrected the one I originally posted about by reentering as a disagreement, then rechecking “as good as it can be” and it did work, but cumulatively doing that to 30-some-thousand observations does not seem like a good use of identifier time.

7

And bearing in mind that this is not a one-off problem but happens whenever taxon changes are made in the right circumstances (though I haven’t worked out exactly what those circumstances are), and most of the time people won’t notice…

If this bug is marked solved, I think a new bug report is needed, because the system of taxon changes is not working the way it should.

2 Likes
9

As far as I am aware the system is working as designed, which can be problematic for sure. If you’d like you can submit a feature request or start a General topic to discuss similar scenarios. I’m not sure the disagreeing ID would always apply because the taxon concepts may have changed (vs. essentially just the genus name in this scenario between these 2 taxa I believe).

10

I see the name of the topic was substantially changed, which is confusing for people who read through the discussion or contributed to the topic prior to the change. I updated the topic title to reflect both the original topic title and your added comment. See also note above.

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