Placeholders no longer are displayed in web Explore and Observation detail screens (since switch to v2 API?)

Bug Reports
1

I noticed that Placeholders no longer display in the web Explore and Observation detail screens. I’m not certain, but I assume this is related to the switch to using the v2 API (instead of the v1 API) in these screens, since it doesn’t look like the screens are explicitly requesting species_guess from the v2 API when retrieving data.

The Identify screen doesn’t look like it’s affected (yet?), since it’s still using the v1 API, and the Edit Observations and individual observation Edit screens are not affected either, since they continue to use other methods to retrieve data.

I suspect the changes in the Explore and Observation detail screens might be intentional, as part of a larger plan to remove Placeholders from the system altogether. However, even if it is intentional, it seems like bad practice to modify screens to no longer display information before you at least close down all the usual means for folks to create new records with placeholders.

I made a dummy observation with a placeholder just to illustrate the problem. The Edit Observations screen still shows the placeholder:

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… but the placeholder is missing from the Observation detail screen:

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… and it doesn’t show up in the Explore screen either:

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3 Likes
2

A popup prompt to chose Notes or a Comment - would help.

3

If you have a new feature to propose please start a new topic.

4

There’s no plan to remove placeholders. I’ve made an issue for our engineers, they believe it’s a bug.

2 Likes
5

hmmmm… i got the impression that removal of the ability to input placeholders in the new iOS app was part of a bigger plan. maybe that is just my own brain seeing patterns where there aren’t any?

2 Likes
6

I thought this was intentional, I think it’s been this way for a bit.

7

it’s possible you might have seen the behavior longer if you opted into the beta test for the v2 API. i’m not sure though.

8

I might be misremembering, I just recall having trouble finding my placeholders semi-recently. I know there was a time where it went from placeholder to Unknown (placeholder: [string]).

9

Just to be clear I wasn’t part of those decisions. But since placeholders are problematic in multiple ways I think we’d like to reduce the number of them being created, and one way to do that is via a redesign in the app and prevent them from being added at all. The new app also has an onboard model that will cover a lot of commonly-seen species so you can add a “real” ID linked to iNat’s taxonomy without an internet connection, or you can also choose an iconic taxon. Those should reduce the number of placeholders needed to be used.

3 Likes
10

Placeholders should be showing up on observation pages again. They didn’t show up on Explore before, so that wasn’t a change.

11

if the Explore page didn’t have placeholders before, then it seems like the problem has been fixed. the Observation detail page seems to have been fixed.

12

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