Place I made is found in Universal search but when selected shows as "Null"

I don’t know if this is a bug or just something I have done wrong in creating or editing or naming a Place, and need to correct.

MacOS Sierra 10.12.6
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The Universal Search page, search for the Place I created “Forest below Pohutukawa Bank”

Step 1: Type full or any part of Place name into Universal search field

Step 2: Select the Place “Forest below Pohutukawa Bank” when it appears as expected in the Search results (not the Project of the same name)

Step 3: See the result “Null” and try again

Step 4. and again…numerous variations, also try the “Fiind a Place” field

Step 5. Try again on a different day. I believe that sometimes I have been successful, and examined the Place but could not see what is wrong with it…is it a Parent thing, or a name, or display name, that is unacceptable? I don’t see any strange characters.

It could be that I broke something in changing one of the name fields, which I have tried with one or two Places to see what happens if I remove the autopmatically added “AU” (the standard iNat code for Auckland, which appears odd to me because AU is the standard abbreviation for Australia)

To clarify, it is the “About” Place page itself which returns Null. The Place Observations still appear as expected.

Seems like it was a name thing. I changed one letter in the name and then changed it back and now it’s working for me. Is it working for you?

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Yes thanks, I was able to get in just now. But how were you able to open the page to edit the name? Are you an administrator?

Curators can edit community curated places.

(Only staff can edit Standard Places, like countries/counties/provinces.)

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Thanks! I wondered if I had missed something…

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I have seen place searches result in “=null”. If they are my places, can I fix it? Ie, what is a “null slug”?

The slug is the part of the URL after places/, so in https://www.inaturalist.org/places/forest-below-pohutukawa-bank, the slug is forest-below-pohutukawa-bank. I don’t know how or why slugs sometimes get set to null, but if you have edit privileges on a place, you can change the slug.

To do this, go to the edit page for your place.

Then set the Display Name to the name you would like for your slug (it will automatically be changed to lowercase, spaces replaces with dashes, etc.).

image

Then, because there is a small bug, you also need to change the Name in order to force the slug to update. Any change is fine, and you can change it back afterward.

When you save the changes, the slug should immediately update.

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Thank you! I will try it.