Platform: web site on ios
App version number, if a mobile app issue:
Browser, if a website issue: brave
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/home
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Description of problem:
Step 1: go to homepage
Step 2: when logged in, your “All Updates” feed displays activity. Our workflow is to click the “Show More” tab at bottom right of each observation’s box. But “Show More” does not exist for some observations. We think it was always there for every observation until the last week or two.
Step 3:
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I’m not sure that’s a bug. “Show More” only appears when your updates feed doesn’t show all of the updates for the displayed item. In your screenshot it shows identifications. It appears that each of those were only identified by one identifier, so no button is needed.
Since each user can only access their own updates feed, I checked my own updates for comparison: I have a recent Canada Goose observation identified by two identifiers at around the same time and it has Show More which, when pressed, shows one additional identifier where previously it only showed one. Other observations of mine that only one identifier identified recently have no Show More button because there’s nothing more to show. This all seems to be working normally.
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Really appreciate your explanation for why “show more” exists and why it’s not always there at present.
What we still need clarity about is this: Are we mistaken that, until recently, “show more” was there for every observation and that it revealed all activity that ever happened, including observer’s initial ID, and not just new content constituting more than one action?
If so, that still might not make this a bug if the change (if this is a change) is intentional. Can others weigh in on this?
Not sure if we’re at “Solution” yet—though someone else thinks so apparently.
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I see. I went further back in my updates to verify this, checking numerous updates. What you say about all IDs showing back to your original ID is correct, so I apologize for imprecisely describing the behaviour of the button and when it shows. I don’t think that substantially changes my diagnosis, though: it shows when there is more than one recent update to an observation and does not show when there’s only one recent update to it.
In my review this morning, I see that “Show More” still only appears when more than one recent update was made to the observation (where an “update” can be an ID, a field being added, a comment, etc.) Without delving into the code or confirmation by someone else who knows it, I couldn’t say how recent “recent” needs to be, but I see one observation that has “Show More” and that had one update on April 27 and another on May 19, so apparently two updates within the past month may cause “Show More” button to be shown. However, I observed that my other observations that have several IDs and comments but only one within the past month three months (see my next comment) do not have “Show More” button.
I checked the one observation of yours in the screenshot that you showed that has 3 IDs but no “Show More” button. It only has a single recent update, so it should not have a “Show More” button.
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I felt it was sloppy of me to not try to empirically determine what “recent” is, so I followed up my previous reply with a brief look at the code and some further testing on my updates feed.
I observed that when I pressed the “More” button at the bottom of my dashboard, it added a from=# parameter to the URL. I confirmed by looking in the dashboard_updates action in the users controller that this is the base time (Unix epoch time) for showing up to 50 updates. I then made a series of modifications to that timestamp to save myself the bother of pressing “More” hundreds of times, e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/home?tab=updates&from=1743476400 for April 1, 2025. By this method, I worked my way backwards in time to find that the earliest updates that could be shown were from February 27, 2025, i.e. 3 months ago. Any earlier than that would result in an empty page. Therefore, it appears that “recent updates” are only kept for three months, so I would expect “Show More” to appear on an observation only if more than one update occurred within this period of time.
If you want to check older recent updates in your own feed without pressing “More” repeatedly, then you can modify the URL I gave above giving it different timestamps for different dates/times with the aid of this online Unix epoch converter: https://www.epochconverter.com/
I agree with @wildwestnature - I would like to understand if this is a bug or an intentional change. I use this feature all the time to check through my notifications. It does seem correct that they’re now limited to only have “Show More” when there is more than 1 recent update, but I also noticed that sometimes it does not show all the IDs (even when they are all within the past 3 months).
Here is an example from an observation I uploaded 03/29/2025. The “Show More” button does not show my own original ID of Surf Scoter, but it shows the other two IDs. Here is a screenshot of what I see:
This is definitely different behavior and I’m curious to know what happened. Is there a way to unmark this as solved while we wait for one of the iNat Staff to respond?
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Sure, clearly we’d benefit from either a deeper dive into the code (i didn’t have time for that this morning) or input from someone who already knows the exact expected behaviour.
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