Bots shifting location unexpectedly

[bengtan]

There are anecdotes of bots 'shifting' location unexpectedly. As in ... the user thinks the bot is at location X but the bot is at location Y, where X and Y differ by a few hundred metres (?).

It has been difficult to pin down and we're not always sure when it happens.

1.

For example, there was one time when Miranda discovered that the bot 'The Stidham Residence' (on Staging) was located on a pasture outside the house when she was sure it was always on the house itself.

If, as suspected, the location changed, it's not known when it changed because we don't think to look.

2.

There was another instance of this, described as follows.

The bot is Montrose West Hollywood (80b22c12-ccc3-11e8-977a-db87144b5e00) on Staging.

Miranda created this bot on 2018-10-10. She was pretty sure she placed the bot directly on the (swimming pool on the roof of the) building, but on the evening of 2018-11-07, she discovered that it was about a block away from the expected location.

Looking through the database indicated that, upon creation, on 2018-10-10, it was created with coordinates 34.088586211900676,-118.38751584291458 and the address 942 Hammond Street. The user was pretty sure that she selected 900 Hammond Street, but somehow it was created wrong.

On 2018-11-07, after discovering it was wrong, she corrected it to coordinates 34.08763035342593,-118.38739179074764 and address 900 Hammond Street.

3.

Since we have one documented instance of this, Miranda then discovered a way to artificially reproduce it.

• Place the bot at the desired location.
• Zoom out of the map a lot and then complete bot creation.

Sometimes, the bot gets created in a location which is (incorrectly) shifted by a few hundred metres.

The suspicion is that, the map gets moved accidentally by the user (at a large enough zoom, even a few pixels is enough to move things by hundreds of metres).

However, this is an artificial and contrived way to reproduce this behaviour. It may offer a clue to 1 or it may not be related. 1 and 3 may be related, or they might not.

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At this point, this problem has been hard to pin down and document. We probably need some more anecdotes and flashes of inspiration before we can understand it enough to make progress.

[bengtan]

2966 and #3068 might be related (speculation).

[thescurry]

I can cause location pins to shift up by simply tapping “edit”. If I make an unrelated change (say, changing the location name) and save it, the location pin saves in the new incorrect location.

Maybe this is related?

[bengtan]

I can cause location pins to shift up by simply tapping “edit”.

I can, too. Once I go into the 'edit bot' screen, it's very easy to accidentally change the location.

• Simply entering the edit screen seems to displace it by a little bit.
• Tapping to change the icon displaces it by a more noticeable amount.
• If a user momentarily touches the screen, they could unknowingly do a very small swipe which could also change the location.

So ... I dunno ... it seems a bit too easy to accidentally change the location.

Maybe we need to change the UI so it's less mistake-prone?

[thescurry]

It's possible to update the UI. I asked Alan to take a crack at it and he suggested the following tweaks: https://zpl.io/aB5y340 Also it does appear that in some cases if you back out (left arrow at the top left), it still saves the unexpected location move. But if you back out... it should discard all changes. I need to confirm under what conditions this happens. @mstidham maybe we can poke at this on Tuesday?

[mstidham]

I have confirmed that discard changes does discard the pin move but there is a delay in seeing the pin move back to the original location. Video attached: https://app.box.com/s/i4999hre4e4dvt965d6116br51erbpfs

[bengtan]

@mstidham:

Do you still think this is relevant?

I'm considering closing it since it's either not been happening, or has become less important.

[mstidham]

@bengtan I had an issue with this just the other day. An old location "Norther Chophouse" was north of the actual location. I edited it back to the correct location. I have went through probably 20 locations and see no issues and then just found 2 examples. (screenshots below) These are old locations and I'm not seeing it with locations created recently. Is there data that shows the gps coordinates when created and then when there is a change? I have not edited the 2 locations below.

[bengtan]

Is there data that shows the gps coordinates when created and then when there is a change?

Unfortunately, no. There's no historical data stored in the DB per se except for created_at and updated_at timestamps.

For these two bots, they are (times in UTC):

Gambinos created_at: 2017-05-31 23:45:28 updated_at: 2018-10-25 20:41:58 Alva vs. Woodward Softball created_at: 2018-05-21 20:50:36 updated_at: 2018-10-25 20:41:44

I dunno if you can infer anything from that.

If a bot was changed recently (ie. in the last 2-4 weeks), the traffic logs might record it ... but that's not useful for those two bots.