Where are older observations? Over a year's worth are missing

Bug Reports
1

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 (Android, iOS, Website):Android and Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About): 14

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Step 1: Noticed obs. were missing, oldest obs. is 4-14-21

Step 2: Checked join date. 3-28-20

Step 3: Where are more than a year’s worth of missing observations?

2

yeah, I was wondering why I couldn’t find old observations a while back.

3

What URLs are you using?

4

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?page=7&place_id=1&subview=table&user_id=marykhayden
returns observations back to 4/14/21

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5

How many observations did you do between March 2020 and April 2021? Did you possibly use a different account during that time? When did you notice observations were missing? Have you still got any photos that you know were observations, so that you can tell the date and time of a missing observation to help someone possibly track down what has happened?

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6

This has happened with me multiple times too. Older observations don’t show up in Search Results.

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7

Can you please provide a specific example the next time it happens? There’s not much we can do without one, unfortunately.

This is often the case for these situations.

@marykhayden I see a fair number of deleted observations from your account, but none that were older than 2022. Unfortunately without more information, like perhaps another account you might have made, or an observation you’re certain you made but isn’t in your search results, it will be difficult to investigate.

8

Attaching a photo from May 2020…I remember it as one of my first iNat observations. It’s possible I had a different account name, but why were these old account observations kept all together until recently? If differing accounts are the problem, how can I consolidate all my observations in one place again? They must have the same email address in common, but I don’t recall the exact user name.

IMG_20200526_172621444 (1)
IMG_20200526_172621444 (1)3000Ă—4000 481 KB

9

I discovered several or more years ago I had two accounts. Apparently I’d forgotten I had made one already when I created a new one. After I found the username for my first account, which had a few records, iNat staff was able to merge the two and all the records under one.

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10

If you know the species and location for that beetle photo, you can search for it and see if it’s in iNat.

Sorry, that message was meant for Mary.

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11

As @jnstuart noted, staff can merge accounts, but you’d need to contact help@inaturalist.org for this.

I think the suggestion to look for observations of that species from that time in whatever place you took it could hep you find the observation (and any potentially different username) if they exist.

1 Like
12

That photo doesn’t appear in an observation in May 2020:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?d1=2020-05-01&d2=2020-05-31&place_id=any&taxon_id=215596
(Unless it was not identified, but that seems unlikely as it is quite distinctive.)

13

So, I misunderstood.

My problem was that I couldn’t find any observations older than a couple of years. Nobody’s. I was using the app and told it to sort oldest first.

The two problems may be related though.

14

I haven’t noticed this recently, but it has happened in the past. When I perform a search from the home page for a particular taxa to either look for my older observations (by clicking Filters > My Observations) or to search for observations from a specific region (Filters > Location > India), older observations have not shown up in the search results.

I remember discussing this with @ajamalabad a while ago and I believe he too has faced this. It is also not something that happened every time so I don’t know how to replicate it at the moment.