Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Firefox & Chrome
Description of problem
The project badge for my collector project Caterpillars of Eastern North America is no longer showing up on members’ individual observation pages. It still appears on older observations (such as this one), but not more recent observations (such as this one). New observations meeting project criteria are still being added to the project, but the badge isn’t showing. I understand that the badge does not show if the observer has not joined the project (since it is a collector project) - I’m specifically referring to observations made by project members. This was brought to my attention this morning by project member @zdufran - their newer observations, like mine, are not showing the project badge (for example). For reference, here are a few screenshots:
Older observation showing project badge:
Newer observation not showing project badge:
I searched the forum for any information, thought it might be related to recent platform changes, but I couldn’t find anything. If this has already been addressed elsewhere, please point me in the right direction.
Strangely the project badge appeared when I voted for something in the DQA to make it Casual, then disappeared again when I removed my vote. Can you try changing the Quality Grade setting to “any”? (uncheck the boxes next to Research, Needs ID, and Casual)
As the text says you need to select at least one Quality Grade. The obvious two to have would be RG and Needs ID but depending on your needs you might want Casual as well.
This happened to me a few days ago. I checked that the observations concerned, one an old one and one a new one, were inside the Collection area. They were , as the old one, and after some minutes the new one, were visible in the Project page.
I moved the old obs further inside the Collection area, and it still had no badge, so I wrote a post to this forum on the issue of neither being collected by the Project, but before posting the query here I went back and checked again. They were now both showing in the Project page, and the old observation now had the stamp, but the new one didn’t.
I have never had this happen before. I decided to wait and see if it appeared, thinking server delays might be responsible.
Sure enough, the next day the new obs also showed the Project badge.
Yes, I was going to add that. Collection Project badges don’t immediately attach to observations, especially if you’re not a member of the project specifically. If you think of what happens in the background is the server has to search all projects to see if the observation fits the criteria. This may be done at a low priority so be delayed when server load is high.
I understand that, but I have in the last 2 years uploaded about 15,000 observations in Projects I created, including this recent observation. I have never had a delay of more than a minute before the Badge appears in the Project, and in fact it is the appearance of the badge that I use to tweak and eventually confirm the correct placement of the obs, after having (over a period of months for each Place) similarly used this response to correct, by repeated small edits, the boundaries of each of the Places I created for the Projects. Ie the response to moving a Place boundary or an observation has always been almost jnstant.
This does not apply to search results, or to the observations shown in the About this Place page. But it has done to the appearance of an obs in a Collection project, and the simultaneous appearance of the badge in an observation.
I can live with it, now I know that there can now be a delay in this feature, but it is helpful to know there has been this change.
Yes, a few times this has caught me out, as I did not need to select anything in that box in making my first projects. I think there was a change, and at some stage when working through the issue on no Project collection of an obs I discovered I only two boxes were checked, RG and Needs ID.
Now I routinely check all 3 boxes when creating a Project, and investigate that setting if a collection problem occurs with an old obs disappearing from an older Project, or a new obs not appearing.
It has seemed to me that a Default setting of all 3 grades would be preferable, and likely assumed by many.
When I had the quality boxes unchecked the badge disappeared from my example “older observation,” then came back nearly immediately when I returned the project settings to their previous state. Neither of the other observations linked from my first post is showing the project badge, despite each being at least a week old.
I just tested this out and leaving all three data quality grades blank defaults to “any”. I agree that description text is confusing, though.
By far one of the most common issues I see when new users make a collection project is that they only choose “casual” grade, resulting in most observations not being included in their project. So it was my suggestion that RG and Needs ID be checked by default as those are like the ones most people want to include.
@eraskin I’m sorry for the late reply, but I can replicate this issue. I’ve sent an example to our developers.
I never used that panel at all in creating my first hundred or so Projects, ( at ,east I think do…as I was unfamiliar with it when I found it later) and there were no problems. Then at some point, when tracing the cause of a Casual obs not being collected by one of my newer Projects…i found the two boxes you suggest were check-marked, but the Casual one was not. So then I checked all other recent Projects and found the same thing.
I assumed a change had been made to the default.
A default that excludes anything does not seem a good idea to me. If you get things you dont want, that wil prompt you to investigate, but if you dont know an exclusion is occurring, you wont know your Project is missing observations.
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
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
I have a Place for my home garden, and a Project for that Place:
This is occurring for other projects and appears to be an actual change in behavior (intended or not) for iNaturalist from the way it previously behaved. Google Chrome on laptop, Safari on iPhone. I don’t think this is browser dependent.
I am seeing this for a collection project I manage (Moths of Oklahoma). Observations that meet the requirements are still showing up in the project itself, but the observation page does not show that project listed. The problem is not restricted to non-research grade observations or people that have not joined the project. This change in behavior is within the last 2 weeks.
Yup, almost every obs has missing projects, some are not shown anywhere I check. I believe it didn’t start for me before there were problems with server.
And a number of missing projects can change if you reload your page with observation (here is not a complete list in the both variants)/ Ytre is a first attept:
And a number of missing projects can change if you reload your page with observation (here is not a complete list in the both variants). Here is a first attempt:
