Some, but not all, records of a taxon with open taxon_geoprivacy are automatically obscured

Hi everyone,

Has anyone run into this before? An iNat user in NZ (arnim) let me know that a NZ plant, tauhinu, has some (about half) of its observations auto-obscured. It’s a non-threatened NZ endemic species. Looking at the history, it looks like a young American curator (birdwhisperer) added a conservation status to it of naturally uncommon and set it to obscured, back in January this year. There is no need for this species to be obscured and this change was undone in May by a NZ curator (invertebratist). Yet, about half of the observations (2,065 of them) remain auto-obscured.

Is there anything I can do to fix this as a curator, or am I going to have to ask Tony to get under the hood and get a server kicked?

Auto-obscured records: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6803&subview=table&taxon_geoprivacy=obscured&taxon_id=349798

All records: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6803&subview=table&taxon_id=349798

Thanks for the suggestions.

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Looking at the history again, to clarify, the taxon_geoprivacy was set back to Open in February 2025 by comradejon (based on this flag https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/735727) then in May invertebratist added the NZ conservation status (non-threatened) and geoprivacy Open for the NZ Place. Either way, I would have expected everything to have a taxon geoprivacy open again now.

I think this has happened before; sounds like an indexing bug. I would try changing the status (maybe wait a little) and change it back. Or try inactivating and reactivating the species—that usually works with other reindexing bugs.

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Thanks Thomas. I was guessing it was something like that. I’ll try what you suggest and see if that works.

I tried adding a new global conservation status with geoprivacy Open. That was a couple of days ago now and the auto-obscured observations have remained stubbornly obscured.

I just set the taxon to inactive then back to active so I’ll see if that helps shake things up.

That seems to have done something. Each time I refresh my browser now there’s less a few auto-obscured observations.

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