This is one of those little things that probably doesn’t even matter, but it’s been bugging me for weeks and I figure someone on here must know. When viewing my Observations on the “old” App, there’s a little bubble icon to indicate if someone else has added a comment or ID to an observation. Some of the bubbles have a “1” in them, and others have a “2” in them, but I can’t figure out any rhyme or reason as to why the numbers are different.
You’d think it just means some have 1 comment/ID and others have 2, but that’s not the case. Maybe some have a second ID that was withdrawn? Also doesn’t seem to be the case. Maybe some have my ID plus one “agree” while others have someone else’s “leading” or improving" ID, but that’s not it either. Here’s a screenshot of my homescreen:
And here are some of the observations with “1” notification:
While here’s one with “2” notifications:
Same number of IDs, at the same level, even by the same users, but they have different numbers of notifications. Someone here must know what’s going on, because I’ve looked everywhere for differences, and I can’t find anything.
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Android does weird things too that I’ve never been able to figure out.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/pink-identification-symbol/64367/3
In my experience the number has always lined up nicely with the number of comments and IDs on my observations. I have noticed that in certain cases, adding an ID myself adds to the number tally. For example, if I upload something in the app as genus level, then later refine it to species on my computer, the number tally goes up in the app, even though I was the user to add the ID. Maybe this is what’s happening for you? Or maybe there are other situations that count towards the tally when you wouldn’t expect them to?
I pulled up some of the observations you showed above and I agree, they’re seemingly identical. Maybe it’s a strange bug.
I’ve been experiencing this on iOS on the newest version of the old app as well, for probably about a week or two. I think it’s a bug.
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this seems to be a bug, yeah. I’ve also been experiencing this lately and it’s a new unexpected behaviour. oddly, it started happening even though I haven’t updated the old app – it’s still called just plain “iNaturalist” on my phone.
