I am having this same problem as well, with some additional issues such as spontaneous deletion of random taxa and errors assigning admins. In order to provide as much information as possible while also avoiding creating clutter in the Forums, I have added my very similar bug report as a comment below:
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Safari, then Chrome
URLs of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mo-plants-of-socc-dataset (1)
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/socc-missouri (2)
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
(A)
(B)
(C) These two screenshots below are treated as one, because they are the same view after refreshing the page, showing how the order has been “scrambled”.
(D)
Description of problem:
Step 1: User jfaupel created project (1), with myself as admin for editing purposes. I added 109 taxa to the Observation Requirements category, saved the project, and then continued editing to add more taxa.
Step 2: Once I had added a total of 148, I saved again, but I got error code (A). Not wanting to lose the data I had entered, I tried saving the page a few more times, but kept getting the same error.
Step 3: I exited the tab (previously in Safari), and tried to edit the project in Chrome instead. The additional taxa I had tried to add had (as expected) not saved, but the original 109 were normal and still in the project.
Step 4: To test whether I could add taxa again, I added one new species to the project, and saved it. It saved successfully and without error codes. However, all 109 previously-added taxa were now duplicated.
Step 5: To see whether the duplication would repeat or disappear, I added another new species. The duplicated 109 entries did not repeat or disappear, but simply remained duplicated. The two new entries I had added were not duplicated. On the project page, entries appeared in alphabetical order (B).
Step 6: From a different device, and while I was not editing the project, user jfaupel deleted the duplicate entries, then saved. At times, when an entry was deleted, the list would instantly “scramble”, no longer appearing in alphabetical order thus making it more difficult to find and delete duplicate entries (C). Any subsequent attempts to edit the project by either user (nothing was changed, we would simply hit ‘Save’ to try and reset the display back to alphabetical) produced the same “scrambled” display while in the editing page for the project, while the same alphabetical display (B) remained on the public page (1).
Step 7: Throughout the next hour, we did not attempt to edit the project any further, but each time page (1) was refreshed, the “species” number displayed in (D) seemed to oscillate randomly between any number ranging from 10 to 37, both raising and lowering the number as taxa were deleted and added back to the project seemingly at random, before finally settling on 10 as seen in the screenshot (D). Once the project had stopped updating itself, many taxa were deleted, but those that were deleted did not match those that we had attempted to delete in step 6. Rather, a seemingly random selection of entries was deleted.
Step 8: I tried to delete the remaining entries, in order to start the project over from scratch, but this was not possible for some entries. About half of the taxa were unable to be deleted, and those that were resistant to deletion were seemingly scattered randomly throughout the list. Upon repeated attempts, the same species were unable to be deleted each time.
Step 9: To try and start the project over from scratch, I created project (2).
Step 10: I successfully added taxa to the project and saved it normally.
Step 11: I tried to make user jfaupel an admin on the project and transfer ownership, but the username was not recognized, and could not be added as an admin (no error was given, the action simply yielded no result).
