Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.
Platform
Website
Browser
Chrome, on Chromebook
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=48.58523401596285&nelng=22.89654382927914&place_id=any&subview=map&swlat=45.73707675143513&swlng=16.1135345252066&taxon_id=47822
Screenshots of what you are seeing
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
I started to experience this issue after I changed the website language setting in my Chromebook to Hungarian (previously it was English). After switching it back to English, WAI. I realize the website language setting in Chrome controls the language of the embedded Google Map on the web UI.
Step 1: While website language settings in Chrome set to Hungarian (or you may try other languages), go to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations
Step 2: In the location filter input field, type in Hungary.
Step 3: You’ll notice a square custom boundary appearing around the country, and not the country’s border is used for the selection (see screenshot above).
The expected boundary is shown below, when using the Map in English:
This is part of a known problem that has to do with the handoff of search results from Google to iNat in different languages. Please use the Place search in Filters to get the correct boundary while running the site in Hungarian.
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Thank you Jane! Not sure if it’s the same issue, but there are place names like “Tiszadob” or “Verpelét” that appear in the place drop down using the main Observations page’s input field and generate a square custom border, but they don’t bring up any matches using the place input under the filters and on the project setup page. The expected behavior would be that these places bring up exact matches in any of the geo input fields throughout the site, and the bring up a map not with a square custom border, but with the actual border of the place.
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iNat has two kinds of places, Standard and Community Curated. Standard places include countries, states (and state-level places), and counties (and county-level places). Cities/towns/villages/etc. only exist in the system if they have been added by the community. If you want the true borders for villages, you’ll have to add them, otherwise the best iNat can do is to use the squares that it gets from Google’s search results. More info here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/standard+places
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Following the steps here, I made kmls for the boundaries for Tiszadob and Verpelét. If you want to make places for them in iNat, you can download them here and here. Just change the file extension to .kml before you upload them to iNat.
Thank you Jane, this is very useful. Btw, I wasn’t aware of the place pages at all. From where on the site are they accessible? I can only navigate there using the link from your forum response.
The main Place page is in the bar at the top.
Individual place pages can be accessed from the About link in the search (though there are also other ways to get there.)
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