Reloading Identify with ⌘+R sometimes also reviews observations

When using the Mac keyboard shortcut to reload the Identify page (⌘+R, command + R), the most recently selected observation occasionally also gets reviewed. Presumably this is because just pressing R reviews the observation last selected (which is maybe a separate bug?). However, for the reload shortcut to work, you have to press ⌘ first, so it’s not an accidental mistype and it seems like a bug. It doesn’t happen super frequently so I haven’t found any patterns, but it happens often enough to be annoying.

Sometimes the observation is marked as reviewed right before the page reloads but then once it does reload it isn’t reviewed, so there’s no real issue. Sometimes this same thing happens, but selecting the observation again “permanently” marks it as reviewed. Sometimes reloading the page marks the observation as reviewed right before the page reloads and it doesn’t come back when the page reloads. Sometime reloading the page just makes the observation disappear with no “pre-mark” warning. Sometimes reloading the page a second (or third or fourth) makes it mysteriously reappear again unreviewed. Most of the time the page reloads with no issues. The issue only happens with the keyboard shortcut, not reloading the page with the reload button.

Here is a scenario of the second situation in the paragraph above. It took a few tries to get it to happen, but this seems like the most common issue.

Identify queue, last observation was last observation selected.

Observation marked as reviewed after ⌘+R but before page finishes reloading.

After reloading reverts to what is expected.

Selecting the observation marks it as reviewed automatically.

When deselected, the observation is still reviewed.

Page is reloaded again, the observation is gone (because the filters only allow unreviewed observations).

I can find the observation on the Explore search, and unreviewing it makes it show back up in my Identify queue.

Interestingly enough, as I was trying to replicate this for screenshots a different observation mysteriously disappeared: the penultimate observation selected (which is the first time I’ve noticed this, but maybe it happens more often). This would be the fourth situation in my above paragraph. This is the view before my first screenshot (third observation straight up disappeared):

Using Chrome on a Mac

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What does “selected” mean here?

Clicking on an observation in the Identify page, so the view in the fourth photo.

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That is a shortcut to reload the page in MacOS and is not an iNat specific thing. It is equivalent to F5 on Windows.

I am aware of that, but I don’t think this would be a issue with my hardware or software. There seems to be a bug associating the MacOS keyboard shortcut with the iNat keyboard shortcut, so I’d say it’s related to iNat, even if iNat isn’t the source of the issue. There’s always the potential for a browser problem.

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We dug into this and I couldn’t replicate but Ken-ichi can. Unfortunately a fix might incur other problems, so there’s no good solution as of now. Made an issue here: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/2859

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OK if it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere feel free to close the topic. :) I’ve switched to using the reload button if there’s observations on the page and that’s really not that much harder than the keyboard shortcut.

When there’s an open issue on github we usually just leave the bug report here on the forum open too.

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The only reason I ever reload the Identify page is to reset the 24 hour authentication token, as I have a pinned tab for Identify. In what situations do you reload the Identify page? Just curious.

I refresh it regularly rather than head to the next page immediately because I leave a lot of observations unreviewed. Refreshing gets rid of the ones that I identified/reviewed and shows me the next batch (below the remaining unreviewed ones at the bottom of the page). If I went to page 2 immediately, I’d be missing out on a bunch of observations, because they will have shifted to page 1.

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I use Identify to ID new observations of groups where I’ve reviewed all the other observations. So depending on how bored I am that could be reloading the page several times a day (on several different tabs). And I can leave interesting observations unreviewed, or observations where I’ve asked a question and want to see if I get a response before I review (such as if there’s no location or photo). Those are the observations that disappear when I reload with the keyboard shortcut.

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This is exactly the problem I was getting at in this post. Not sure what an easy solution would be.