The Selection Areas for a lot of Things are too Small, or Misaligned

On maps, the circles that become upside-down tear-drop shapes when fully zoomed in only have a selectable area that comprises about the lower-right 1/4 of the circle and sometimes that selection area disappears entirely until you zoom in or out. This can make it difficult to click on the point. The upside-down teardrops have a very small selection area also which seems positioned just to the right of them. The close boxes seem to be misaligned at times also. It would make it easier if the entire circle were clickable and the teardrops had a larger selection area as well.

Also, on 75x75 thumbnail images, such as on the copyright info page for any given image, or in your own IDs page for the thumbnails of observations you’ve already ID’d, only the top about 1/3 of the image is clickable. This isn’t true for the thumbnail for that entire species’ profile to the right of it, however. The thumbnails on maps also function fully sometimes, then partly in other circumstances. It seems if you go to a map via “observe” they seem to work, but the maps under a taxon’s profile page have this same issue, except the top ⅓ of the thumbnail is selectable and the bottom ¼, and also sometimes (but not always) just the very center of the thumbnail. Here’s an example: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/984457-Pione-lampa drop down to the map and select one of the points, now try to click on its thumbnail in the pop-up dialogue box. You can see some parts of the thumbnail are selectable, and others aren’t.

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that’s interesting. it looks like the observer and date fields in the pop-up are maybe extending over the photo and preventing it from being selected. the same problem seems to exist in the Identify screen map, since it seems to use the same kind of pop-up as the taxon screen. the problem does not seem to exist in the Explore screen, since that page seems to use a different kind of pop-up.

the observer and date fields might also be related to the problem on the photo detail pages.

this may be related to and may become moot as a result of the effort to replace the gray circles with a square grid. see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/open-test-of-map-tile-improvements/7833. in the latest post there, i’ve noted some similar misalignment between the cells and the clickable areas.

i see this occasionally. usually, i find that if i wait a bit, the markers will eventually become clickable. the way the clickability of the maps is actually implemented is the tiled marker images are loaded as one layer over a basemap, and then an invisible tiled UTFgrid layer is loaded on top of that. so when you click, you’re actually interacting with the UTFgrid, not with the marker layer. sometimes the marker layer is loaded and visible before the UTFgrid has fully loaded. so (some of) the markers may appear as if they are unclickable until their corresponding UTFgrid tile has loaded.

can you provide a specific example of this?

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It seems to be most, if not all of them, if I’m not mistaken. Their selection area is just very small in general, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the pixels you can hit are just a bit off center.

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hmmm… i don’t see a particular problem with the pins in either the taxon or Explore pages.

I just tried and it’s definitely doing it. If I zoom all the way into the first level of upside-down teardrop shaped points, I can easily have the point selectable with my cursor entirely to the right of the point by about 2 mm. But if I try to go left of about mid-way through the tear-drop shape, it becomes unselectable.

Hmm, I just tested the grid design also. It performs exactly the same as the circle-based maps.

Me too. I know the teardrops are clickable, but I have to zoom in and out until I can trigger that click response.

i did a visualization of the clickable are vs the new grid, and this is what i see in terms of misalignment: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/open-test-of-map-tile-improvements/7833/89. i’m hopeful that they can address it now that the grid has officially replaced the circles. (see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-the-red-squares-on-the-observation-map-an-intentional-change/9244 .)

below is a visualization for the points (pins + obscured circles), where the points are in green and the clickable area is in red. note that i think the pins (the upside down teardrops) in the actual iNaturalist maps are shifted down a bit so that you can click on the fat end of the pin instead the point of the pin. from what i can tell, the clickable areas match up pretty well with the obscured circle markers, and if you shift the pins down slightly, they appear to match up pretty well with the red clickable area, too. every once in a while (particularly when the clickable area is arranged as more of a plus sign than a square), you might encounter something that might not be totally in line, but i think it’s a function of the need to approximate the non-square markers with a set of square cells. so, again, i generally don’t see a problem with the pins.

We are still battling to ‘click to open’

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/location-pins-on-maps/45968/11