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.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome
Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.): Random fields are being removed from random observations from several years ago
I briefly examined several of the links and many of them seem to be at Casual status because they are missing dates of observation. Did those originally have dates associated with them that have gone missing? or were the original uploads actually missing dates?
looking at the first 4, the 1st, 2nd, and 4th having missing dates, and the 4th has a missing photo. all of these were created many years ago.
i looked at a copy of the AWS Open Dataset that I have from April 2021, and these observations already had missing dates at that time. so if the dates were removed, then they were removed before then.
these observations were created in the Android app. so if there was a problem, i suspect the problem was in the Android app. where the photos exist, the metadata in the photos does have seemingly valid dates recorded. so i don’t know why the observations wouldn’t have been recorded with valid dates originally. i guess the good news here is that the observation dates could be restored using the dates in the photo metadata.
Well, it depends on which observation we’re talking about. Some no longer have a picture, others no longer have the observation date, and a few no longer have the location data.
All of the observations above have had fields disappear when these observations used to have those fields. For example, the first observation link has had its Date of observation, location of observation, and ID history disappear.
Yes, it seems the same as the previous issue with the same set of observations reported, so I’ve merged. This also fixes the issue with discussing observation fields, since the title of the original post is accurate.
I reposted because I came across another observation in which this has happened since the first post. I still have yet to get an idea of what is actually happening. Each observation is not only data but a memory and it’s quite sad and aggravating that this is happening to my older observations from pre-pandemic.
i don’t think this is right. as far as i can tell, it’s more likely that the data never made it into the observation in the first place. just for example, if you look at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/14690817.json, you can see that this observation has never been updated since it was created.
i looked at a similar observation in your list and updated one of the DQA flags to trigger a reindex, and still nothing changed on the observation. so it’s likely the data just never made it into the database.
you should look at the other thread i mentioned in my previous post. if i recall correctly, one of the folks there mentioned that things weren’t always loaded correctly in the app when the connection was flaky. i suspect you probably experienced something similar and just never realized it until now. moderators might even want to consider merging this thread with that one.
i suspect whatever the problem was has probably been fixed, since you’re not seeing issues on newer onaervation.
