Prevent duplicate identifications

Great idea!
I’ve had this happen to me when I clicked on agree, and when the ID didn’t appear after a few seconds I tried again, thinking that it hadn’t worked.
The one situation I would intentionally add the same ID twice is if I want to disagree with a finer ID, but accidentally click on the wrong option in the popup that appears - although I guess I could work around that by deleting my previous ID

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maybe this one happened by accidentally double-clicking on agree?

I know one way this is created for sure (because it happens to me sometimes):

I make all my IDs using the explore tab, not the identify tab. As I’m scrolling down I’ll open up every observation in a new tab. Because of the bug where the same observation appears 2-3 times on the one page, I’ll sometimes open up the one observation multiple times. I’ll ID the first one, close it, and then ID the same thing (without realising when I’m on autopilot IDing easy stuff) on the second tab. This creates the double ID like you showed.

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if I look at the IDentifications of the person in your example, both ID’s are there

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I think that this happens when a person agrees with everyone’s previous IDs. So in your example I think jeffreypineassociates clicked Agree on jdmore’s ID and then clicked Agree on kristalwatrous’ ID - which resulted in automatically withdrawing their previous (matching) ID. I figure people click Agree on duplicate IDs because they think that they’re marking it as agreement with that specific person, rather than adding their own matching ID. I often notice it happening when the OP is a new user, and they click Agree on every suggestion that’s given - even when there are several of the same taxon.

Anyway, this seems like a good feature request! There’s no reason we should need to be able to add an ID that matches our current ID, so having a warning popup would be good and help people understand what’s happening and how the Agree button works.

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another workflow where this occurs…

identify from the observation page, move the cursor over to click on the observation details (adult/juvenile/egg flowering fruiting etc), page refreshes and adds compare element, mouseclick activates compare and select, and closes, then my first id which started the whole process is withdrawn and the same id is added

when this happens, I know I need to take a break as I am starting to rush :) - but have often thought that the window layout might put the compare in a place that does not rearrange the layout in quite that way

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At least on the web site, once I agree with a particular ID, the agree buttons disappear on any and all other IDs of the same taxon. Currently, on my example obs, I see no agree buttons, because all the IDs match my own current ID. So the scenarios above shouldn’t be able to happen. But maybe things work differently on the phone apps, which I never use to ID things.

Here’s one workflow that could definitely be contributing to the problem:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/limit-available-agree-buttons-specifically-in-the-activity-feed/6574

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I have had this happen through glitches in my internet connectivity too which cause me to click the “agree” button twice.

I only use the web app.

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That would help me a lot. I occasionally accidentally hit the “a” key twice while identifying in identify (out of the many thousands of identifications I add, it’s bound to happen a few times). Also, there are some observations that I mark as unreviewed after identifying because I want to look at this again to make sure my ID is correct at a later date or get to a more specific taxon. Because of this, I have on occasion accidentally hit “a” again adding duplicate identification before realizing I had already IDed it as that. A couple of the other above workflow problems have also happened to me.

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I come here after this remark:

So, I voted for this feature request.

This is simply worth being fixed. Not desirable. No added value. (Just like a spelling mistake).

The server application should ignore (or respond with a warning message as suggested above) a duplicate identification.

Or, if there is a comment associated to the duplicate being submitted, the server could change it on the fly into a comment, so that the content is not lost.

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More workflow examples here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/two-ids-by-the-same-account-myself/10341

Yes, I find it incredibly annoying when I’m trying to go through my notifications and sometimes there’s 3-5 from one person on one observation. And yes I’ve it where they apparently hit agree on every single ID that was on there, and times where they rapid clicked until the page changed. Frequently when a person does this, they also do it on all their observations, needlessly cluttering the notifications.

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I’ve just had this happen to me as well a few times this week, presumably related to slow website response/internet issues. It looked like maybe it hadn’t taken my first click, so I clicked again, only to then see my ID pop up twice on the page. If I catch it, I usually delete one of them again, but there’s a chance I missed a few instances.

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Yeah, my intent with this request is not to eliminate clutter in general, but only clutter that has absolutely no information value. Identical consecutive identifications by the same identifier on the same observation fit that latter category.

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I’ve done this once or twice. It was caused by clicking Agree on a previous identification multiple times, I think because I wasn’t sure if my first ID “stuck”. Haven’t done it in a while though. And this is clearly what happened in the OP’s example observation, because the double ID was identical to the previous one by a different person.

Yep, this seems to happen a lot, maybe due in large part to the (usually) short delay in re-indexing and re-displaying an observation after adding an ID. Which may mean that this is not a solvable problem. If re-indexing and refreshing were instantaneous, the Agree button would disappear before the identifier could click on it again.

Speculating in Developer territory is a dangerous thing, but I’m thinking maybe adding an ID could immediately trigger a brief temporary block on accepting further IDs from the same user on that observation, just until re-indexing and re-displaying is complete. But maybe adding that logic would only slow the system down even more.

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I usually will identify or mark as reviewed everything on a page, then hit “view more unreviewed”, but it sometimes takes so long for my IDs to appear that the same observation will end up on 2 or 3 successive “unreviewed” pages. If I don’t happen to remember that I already identified that particular photo, I’ll sometimes add another one, and they both IDs eventually show up at the same time.

Yesterday I had one give me the “failed to save record, please try again” error, so I re-did the ID, and then they both appeared.

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Surely it wastes resources, slows down the system
to add an ID
then
add the same ID again
which forces
withdraw the first ID

and all we want is the ONE ID.
Better if the system is automated to say - thanks - we’ve got your first ID.

On Wordpress trying to comment again triggers a - you’ve said that already!

Meanwhile I manually check each ID, and delete the unwanted - can’t decide is it or isn’t it - which is not what is going thru my mind. Maybe it is a slow internet Third World issue?

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Comment 17 from @bernard_hiller perhaps also applies to these unwanted duplicates.

To me, it looks more like a “race condition”. The web site is “multi-threaded”. A request gets sent to the server, and while the browser is waiting for the reply, you’re clicking different things and thus send further requests, and somewhen the replies come back to your browser, but not in the order you would need them.
From a software developer’s point of view, quite the naughtiest thing you could have to try to fix.
Because everytime you try to repeat the issue, a little different timig is required, and reproduction fails… And of course, it does also depend on the JavaScript implementation of your browser. Infinite number of combinations possible.

on this thread https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identify-modal-sometimes-shows-information-from-previous-observation/8408/19

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