That suggests a browser difference.
What happens in a private browser window in Firefox?
Interesting, “new private window” made it go away. What does that mean?
Nope. I use the same firefox version, and there is still no colors.
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It could mean there’s some history items (such as cookies or cached files) saved by your Firefox browser that are causing the colours to appear.
Before investigating that, I would strongly advise that you back up your personal data first. (NB: depending on your platform, the Firefox cache may be in a different location to the profiles, so may you may need to back that up separately. You can find its location by typing “about:cache” in the url bar). This is not just a matter of keeping your data safe - it will also help in identifying the exact cause of the issue, since it will allow you to restore the original state.
Once you’ve backed up, try clearing the history items one by one to see which (if any) is causing the issue. If that doesn’t work, you could also create a new profile and log into iNaturalist with that to see if the colours go away. If they do, that would suggest there’s something in the Firefox config that’s causing the issue.
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there is some latent text color formatting on that page tied to iconic taxon, but it is overridden by the default gray that most people see:
if i disable the default gray, then the latent iconic taxon text coloring shows up:
it’s possible that some gremlin occasionally disables the default gray formatting, leading things to fall back to the iconic taxon coloring. it’s also possible that there’s a plugin that purposely disables the gray.
this could resolve the issue, but it probably won’t tell you what triggered it.
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The main point was to back up the current state now so that it can be restored before any relevant history items / config settings are deleted or expire. I assume people would like to know the exact cause of the issue, rather than just make it go away. Apparently disabling all plugins via troubleshoot mode doesn’t eliminate the issue, which suggests there must be some persistent data stored somewhere that restores the colours after a restart. If so, it could be helpful to know how that data is stored, as it might reveal the culprit.
Issue? The thread title is thanking iNaturalist for the “issue.” The general tone of the thread is that more people would like the colors to appear.
Yes - an issue is just some situation that is not yet fully understood. The appearance of the colours might be a side-effect of a bug / unintended “feature” in either iNaturalist or some third-party plugin or user-script, but that does not imply anything about the desirability of the colours themselves.
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as shown in my screenshots, the default gray styling is stored in a stylesheet (show_listed_taxa_xxxxx.css). you can find the model for that here: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/assets/stylesheets/lists/show_listed_taxa.css.
if edanko’s version is different from the model (or what’s shown in my first screenshot above), then something modified it or he somehow got a different version. if the stylesheet is just missing, then there was probably just an issue when he tried to download it initially. (but either way, that knowledge won’t tell him what modified it or why it wasn’t delivered properly.)
he can see the same sort of thing that captured in my screenshots above by using the element inspector in this browser. in Firefox, it’ll look something like this:
if his relevant HTML elements are missing class="rank" (as shown in the middle pane in my above screenshots) or have different classes on them, then that’s another way the problem could have arisen, but that won’t tell you why the class was not set like for everyone else.
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I do get colours, but only on the Edit Observations page (as shown):
I assume the observations highlighted in red have a specific meaning, since they are not limited to genus (though the two shown do happen to be molluscs).
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That, I believe, is base functionality, as this has always been the case for me:
The different colors in that case correspond to different iconic taxa – in my screenshot, green for plants, orange for arthropods, pink for fungi. As I scroll down, I find that blue seems to mean marine life, as it is the color for a hermit crab, a sea squirt, and a bryozoan; but not consistently, as a marine snail is shown in orange.
The appearance of colors on other tabs may be spillover – as I said, I always saw them on the edit observtions page.
The vast majority (99%+) of my observations are marine life, so the orange highlights stand out amongst the blue ones. Molluscs seems to be specifically orange (nudibranchs, bivalves and, I assume, snails). Anyway, this seems to be tangential to the original question so I’ll just leave it here.