Url for Project acquired extra characters

[pisum]

was the addition of the word to the beginning of the umbrella project just a trigger to update the project slug? in other words, if you keep the child project colon-less and now remove the word from the umbrella project name, do you end up with the random-looking characters at the end of the umbrella project slug?

[thebeachcomber]

@pisum

was the addition of the word to the beginning of the umbrella project just a trigger to update the project slug?

yes

@pisum

in other words, if you keep the child project colon-less and now remove the word from the umbrella project name, do you end up with the random-looking characters at the end of the umbrella project slug?

yes

[tiwane]

@thebeachcomber

instead redirects me to one of the daughter projects, which is titled “Wategora Reserve Vascular Plant Survey 2020-2022: Obscured Species”.

Are you certain it was never saved as “Wategora Reserve Vascular Plant Survey 2020-2022”? Or that there was never a project with the slug wategora-reserve-vascular-plant-survey-2020-2022?

What happens is that once a project slug is saved, it can’t be used again - even if the slug for that project is later changed. The intention there is that if someone disseminated outreach materials with the original URL and then changed the title of the project, people could still find the project with the original disseminated URL. Downside, of course, is that it also causes this problem.

[thebeachcomber]

@tiwane

Are you certain it was never saved as “Wategora Reserve Vascular Plant Survey 2020-2022”? Or that there was never a project with the slug wategora-reserve-vascular-plant-survey-2020-2022?

that particular one was never saved as Wategora Reserve Vascular Plant Survey 2020-2022

[bouteloua]

@thebeachcomber

1. I created the daughter project first with the name Wategora Reserve Vascular Plant Survey 2020-2022: Obscured Species. The URL for it is https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/wategora-reserve-vascular-plant-survey-2020-2022-obscured-species exactly as you would expect
2. I created the umbrella project with an extremely similar name, just without the “: Obscured Species”. It now gets a URL with random characters at the end.
3. If you remove the random characters, the link now takes you to the project for step 1
4. So there are now two different URLs that both redirect you to the same project!
5. My guess is that this relates to the colon somehow, since that’s where the name gets cut off

FWIW I tried to replicate by

1. Creating a traditional project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/test-url-123-extra-text-here (Test URL 123: Extra Text Here)
2. Then I created an umbrella project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/test-url-123 (Test URL 123)
3. But the umbrella project does not contain extra characters at the end of the URL; both project URLs are as expected

[tiwane]

According to our logs, this project was saved with the name “Wategora Reserve Vascular Plant Survey: 2020-2022”. So maybe it was saved by accident?

I wonder we should have a staff-only UI tool that can destroy unused slugs for a project, upon the owner’s request…

[pisum]

@tiwane

I wonder we should have a staff-only UI tool that can destroy unused slugs for a project, upon the owner’s request…

if the person who created the unused slug is the same person trying to reclaim the slug, shouldn’t the unused slug just be automatically reclaimed?

[thebeachcomber]

if the logs say it, it must be true and I just can’t remember doing it. But it’s odd that that one is the one it happened for, since the other daughter project under the umbrella is the one with 99% of the observations

[kaipatiki_naturewatc]

The explanation for beachcomber’s experience is likely the explanation for my mine too, as I did mess around with names a lot when creating the projects concerned.