Platform: web
App version number, if a mobile app issue:
Browser, if a website issue: Safari
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
**
Description of problem**:
Step 1: go to explore
Step 2: scroll through a few observations
Step 3: see duplication of identical observations at random
Is this a bug just for myself?
I have experiences this on the explore page too, and using Safari, like you. Really irritating and needs to be fixed. Affects me a lot as an identifiers scrolling through tons of observations per day. Thanks for bringing up this matter :)
I’ve seen this before and think it’s a classic live feed pagination issue caused by naively implemented pagination (where here in the infinite scroll, each “page” is a ten observations or so).
On the unfiltered Explore page, by the time you scroll down far enough for iNat to need to load the next “page” of observations, more have been added, and some of the ones you just saw got pushed onto the next “page”, so they get loaded again. You could confirm that this is the case by filtering the Explore page to just your observations, and then you should never see this bug.
This could be fixed by iNat dropping the idea of “pages” altogether and instead loading the next batch of observations older than the last one in the current batch.
I’ve experienced this as well (multiple times but rarely), refreshing the page fixes it
This is a long-standing annoyance in general browser behavior, not necessarily a bug on iNaturalist. I think @barnabywalters’ explanation is correct. And it happens with various browsers.
It has nothing to do with the browser, it’s a bug (or at least a flaw) in iNaturalist’s infinite scroll pagination implementation. The reason you see it on other websites is that a lot of developers make this mistake, and it’s only visible to users when they’re browsing a site at the exact same time that new content is added. It’s a trivial fix (probably just requires changing one line of code).
