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
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: individual observations
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
Step 1: Observation has placeholder text but no ID.
Step 2: Add an ID.
Step 3: Placeholder vanishes rather than being saved as an observation field.
I noticed this this morning when I added an ID but forgot to copy the placeholder text. I went to find it to copy it to the body of the observation and couldn’t. Fortunately I remembered it and was able to type it (yes, I prefer to be lazy and copy), but the text no longer seems to be being saved as usual. One example observation where I copied the placeholder text before adding an ID but it doesn’t seem to have been saved: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/262463402
as far as i know, this has never been a feature of system. to the extent you see observations that have such an observation field, they are probably being added by folks running this project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/placeholder-backup.
it’s also worth noting that the original placeholder is still stored on the back end until it is overwritten when the observer adds an actual ID. in your example, you can see this by going here and searching in the text for the species_guess field: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/262463402.json
I’m aware of that project, but I was under the impression that the adding of an observation field happened automatically - so if it ceased to happen, I assumed it was a bug. Is it actually a manual thing done somehow behind the scenes and maybe some get missed?
Okay - thanks for clarifying. I thought the project was just a way to collect them so people could use the saved text more easily, but it sounds like I’ve got things mixed up, which is good to know. I’ve marked this solved.
We wait hopefully for the website to match the new Next app, with NO placeholders.
We try, but there is still a small gap for ‘today’s Unknowns’ where iNat works as intended and destroys the text, before we catch catch them all. @jeanphilippeb ?
Fair enough - I thought I’d seen it before on ‘today’s’ observations, but I could easily be wrong. Sorry for jumping the gun, I just thought if there was a problem it was better to get onto it straight away.
If for some reason my software is not running at the time a new observation comes in and before this observation gets an ID, then the placeholder is not saved in the observation field and the observation is not added to the project.
We are too few persons running the software continuously, day and night, on our PC, so we miss some observation. I also had issues with my Internet box these days.
…and very risky because the “species_guess” may also contain the common name (in whatever language it is) of the current ID or of a former ID that got removed meanwhile. The “species_guess” is not necessarily a placeholder, and I don’t want to back up a text that is not a placeholder. The backup has to be done within few minutes after the observation comes in, or it is not done at all.
The topic is enough complicated like that, nothing more will be attempted.
