Description of problem: I uploaded two observations using the web upload page. The first observation had four photos, which I combined, and the second had one photo. When I uploaded, everything appeared to work, except neither observation was on my Edit Observations page. When I refreshed the page, the first observation appeared (https://inaturalist.org/observations/340740447). The second never did, and remains a blank observation page on iNat (https://inaturalist.org/observations/340740448). I then uploaded the second observation again and it uploaded without a problem (https://inaturalist.org/observations/340740533).
When uploading larger batches of observations, it would be harder to spot when one doesn’t upload properly. Regardless, I’ve not noticed this in a long time so I’m hoping it’s a rare thing.
How did you know this was the observation that was made? Was it a guess, or did you get it from somewhere?
Unfortunately we don’t know exactly what happened here. Both observation create requests were successful, but we don’t have a record of the second observation existing, at least from what we can see now.
Thanks Tony. I checked immediately after the observation didn’t show up, by consecutively adding 1 to the iNat observation ID in the url. This number was straight after the one that worked, and every other one after that was someone else’s observation. Plus, I only tried to upload two observations at the time. So, yes, just a guess, but it seems to be an odd coincidence otherwise.
I could find the missing obs on my calendar page, but the obs themselves would not load (endless spinning Wheel of Death), and they had to be re-indexed.
Hmm. Do you have any firewalls or something similar on your computer?
I was just on a trip and have been uploading photos via slow hotel wifi, plus here at home, and didn’t encounter any dropped observations. I wasn’t using Firefox, though.
Thanks. No, nothing like that. I’ve got uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger running as Firefox extensions. Do you think either of those could be tripping up the iNat Uploader? Again, though, it’s happening very infrequently. Almost always every observation is uploading fine.
There are other known issues with some security options on Firefox (canvas fingerprinting), though that is in browser, not an extension, and affects CV. You could try disabling those extensions on iNat only for a few upload sessions to see if that affects the occurrence of the bug.
I used FF with uBlock Origin for many years without an issue, I doubt it’s that extension. I may hae disabled it for iNaturalist, though, you may want to try taht. Some users have had problems with Privacy Badger in the past.
@cthawley@tiwane Thanks.Good suggestions. It’s so intermittent that I expect it’s going to be hard to nail down what’s the cause here. I might first try jumping to Safari for iNat uploads for a while and see if the same thing ever happens there.
if you notice this in the future, you might want to open your browser’s developer tools and look for errors in the console. there were cases in the past were folks had issues uploading image files because of seemingly random connection resets. it was never clear why this sort of thing occurred, but iNat staff effectively worked around the problem by adding code to retry when an image upload failed. i’m not sure whether they added similar retry logic for when actually creating the observation data, and maybe if not, then there could be a chance that random connection resets during that process could result in the sort of thing you’re describing.
@pisum Thanks. I’ll try that next time I see it. I just did a trial (before I saw your post) alternating between uploading 3 observations with a vanilla Safari install (no extensions) and my Firefox with adblocker extensions. I did 12 sets of 3 uploads in Safari and 11 sets in Firefox. I wasn’t able to catch the bug in the act this time (all 11 sets on Firefox uploaded properly) but there was a similar issue with one of the upload sets in Safari.
After upload, my Observations page showed only the first and last of the three observations I uploaded. Ah ha! I thought, and then went trawling though in the observations between those two looking for it. I found it though, and when I refreshed my Observations page, the middle observation appeared. Again, this was Safari, not Firefox.
First screenshot, immediately after uploading three observations (middle one is missing).
Interesting that your dropped obs (at least in your example above) are moths. My dropped obs were almost exclusively moths. Do you add the Life Stage field when uploading?
Yes, at the moment I’m working through my backlog of moth photos. I saw your note earlier and was wondering about that. These all have the life stage field on them. It’s an odd coincidence that you had this issue with the life stage field too.
