In the list of “PLACES” there are a bunch of “New York City” listings and they all look great. But if you search for My Observations and narrow down to Place: New York City, it selects all of New York state. There seems to be no way to narrow down correctly to NYC in the My Observations part of the site.
Yes one can work around it by going first to the places list and selecting the correct place, then narrowing the search to just my observations. But this is more time-consuming and counterintuitive. The normal way of finding observations in a place should work for NYC.
The “Location” search at the top right uses Google Maps search, which can give unexpected results. iNaturalist has little control over their dropdown suggestions. Whereas the Place filter uses place boundaries entered into the iNaturalist database.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website):
Website App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): NA
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) :
Firefox, although my lab peers have had a similar issue using Chrome URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=48&subview=map 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.):
when trying to use the location search bar to filter for “New York, NY” (AKA new york city), the map filters to New York State. this issue also occurs for the search “New York City, NY”
If this is really the “solution”, then iNat should redesign the page layout. Expecting people to click 3 more times (Filters, More Filters, Place) when there’s a big giant “Location” bar on the top of the page already asking for input is counterintuitive.
iNat is already planning a redesign for the Explore page and 4 of the first 20 comments include something about Location vs Place searching, so it seems likely that will be addressed.
That update is from 3+ years ago, which as somebody recently mentioned on another thread is tech developer speak for “not a priority”. I know the tiny iNat staff is swamped with growth challenges… but that represents a choice in their allocation of resources.
Anyway, this is partly why I mostly gave up on using Bugguide years ago-- they kept promising a big revamp of the platform (“Bugguide 2.0”) that was always just around the corner… for decades. It looks like the same thing is happening here.
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.
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.): Setting location to New York City results in New York state being selected
