Warn me about missing IDs when uploading observations on website

I bulk upload many observtions on my laptop during the summers, and last year, iNaturalist would warn me if I had left an observation without an ID, date or location before submitting a batch.

This year I noticed that iNaturalist doesn’t warn me when I’ve left an observation un-identified (usually because I accidentally forget to combine photos). It still tells me when the date or location is missing.

Was this feature removed purposefully? I think it would be helpful to bring it because it would prevent any accidental duplicates IDed as unknown.

I also could have sworn this used to happen for observations missing IDs, but either that was a bug or I was just mistaken (and that error message only appeared for observations missing IDs and media evidence like a photo). See https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/uploading-observations-without-ids-says-incorrect-error-message/2372/7

I updated your topic title to reflect an actionable feature request. Welcome to the forum!

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Making a feature request doesn’t also record your vote, so you might want to add your vote to it.

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Yes, a warning about uploading something without ID would be very nice and helpful, would make it significantly easier to avoid the “Unknown” observations that tend to crop up with many newer users.
Especially on phones :)

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For what it’s worth, the intent behind not including a warning for observations which lack IDs is to not make someone feel they need to know what they saw in order to post it. However, I think that’s less likely an issue with people using the web uploader than the mobile app(s), plus they’ll have an internet connection when making these observations (I hope).

Added an issue here which I think covers the bases, but I could totally be missing something.

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I also remember this feature used to exist, although I didn’t notice when it disappeared.

This is now reality:

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