Species page is blank after adding conservation status

Bug Reports
1

Platform: Website

Browser: Safari and Brave

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/215974-Camponotus-herculeanus

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Bild 31.08.24 um 14.09
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Description of problem:
I started going through the red lists of my area and adding conservation statuses accordingly. For the first species it went well. Then, adding the conservation status “Least Concern” to one has lead to that species page displaying only a white screen which hasn’t happened previously.

Step 1: Added conservation status (“Least Concern”) for Germany to Camponotus herculaneus
Step 2: Tried to access species page afterwards to double-check link
Step 3: Blank screen showed when trying on multiple browsers

1 Like
2

same for me, blank screen on Opera and Chrome

1 Like
3

I hope I didn’t break anything. :(

But I just did the same thing as with the other species I’ve added a conservation status to and those are still fine.

4

Confirmed on Chrome… very strange.

1 Like
5

based an error message logged in the console for the page to the effect of:

Invalid regular expression: /(*)/

… and based on the information returned by GET /v1/taxa/215974:

"conservation_statuses": [
  {
    "id": 292899,
    "taxon_id": 215974,
    "taxon_name": "Camponotus herculeanus",
    "taxon_rank": "species",
    "status": "*",
    "authority": "Rote-Liste-Zentrum",
    "iucn": 10,
    "url": "https://www.rote-liste-zentrum.de/de/Detailseite.html?species_uuid=5aa5da17-fa9d-44a3-8ebd-fdbe29397894&species_organismGroup=Ameisen&q=Camponotus%20herculeanus%20%28Linnaeus,%201758%29",
    "description": null,
    "source_id": null,
    "geoprivacy": "open",
    "updater_id": 3802382,
    "created_at": "2024-08-31T11:46:17+00:00",
    "updated_at": "2024-08-31T11:46:17+00:00",
    "user": {
      "id": 3802382,
      "login": "eyekosaeder",
      "icon_url": null,
      "orcid": null
    },
    "updater": {
      "id": 3802382,
      "login": "eyekosaeder",
      "icon_url": null,
      "orcid": null
    },
    "place": {
      "id": 7207,
      "name": "Germany",
      "display_name": "Germany",
      "admin_level": 0,
      "ancestor_place_ids": [
        97391,
        7207
      ]
    }
  }
],

… it looks like iNat doesn’t handle * well as a conservation status. maybe the better conservation status to input in this case would be Ungefährdet. i’m not sure how it would be fixed at this point. staff might have to to do it on the back end. there’s not a documented API route for updating taxa.

there might also need to be an update to the screen to either handle inputs like * or else prevent the user from being able to input stuff like that.

1 Like
6

Thank you! That is very good to know. I’m wondering why iNat prefers the short keys over the written out version, anyway.

In any case… Very like me to accidentally find a way to break something on my first day doing curator stuff haha :(

1 Like
7

just a quick note. the thread is marked as having a solution, but i think really, there’s only an explanation at this point. a true solution probably requires more action.

1 Like
8

This specific case has been solved now by editing the conservation status on the taxon edit page (thanks to Arman and kueda).

Shall I leave it as unsolved for the asterisk-bug, or open a new topic specifically for that?

Thank you, everyone who helped! :D

9

i’m not sure how exactly the data was fixed. it doesn’t look like the page was changed. so i wold keep the thread open until the interface is changed to handle the underlying issue.

1 Like
10

@eyekosaeder so you entered * in that field? Or you entered something else and it was saved as *?

11

Yes. I entered “*”
It’s the short code for “Least Concern” of the German red list organisation/institution.

1 Like
12

I stumbled upon the same issue right now on accident.
I entered an asterisk into the ‘Status’ field because it is the short code for ‘Least concern’ in German red list, and the page was blank white due to the error.

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