Hi Anastasia! I’m jumping in here while Nerida is away, and just came across a new zombie encounter. This one is different in that it appears to be the only submission from this contributor:
Nerida suggested I let you know while waiting to see if another encounter from this person pops up!
Thanks,
Chrissy
Hi Anastasia, here is another zombie encounter for your records:
Thanks!
This one’s not actually a zombie! This user submitted a video file (.mov) instead of an image file and that’s why the preview won’t load.
Ah okay thanks!
This also appears to be another case of the user submitting the same encounter multiple times.
This is the original encounter: SeadragonSearch.org
It was submitted 2025-10-17 at 15:45:11.414
The other submissions are this one submitted 2025-10-18 at 00:59:24.969 and the one you just shared which was submitted 2025-10-18 at 10:21:52.009.
Since we’ve established that these aren’t duplicated being created by Wildbook, I’d say it’s safe to assume that when you see this again, there’s a “normal” associated encounter submitted shortly before (within one day).
See how in the screenshot, there’s 12 annotations listed on the original encounter (one head and one body per attached image) and the ones right after have 0? This is usually a good way to find the original encounter is and where the duplicate attempts are and then go into each encounter and cross check that the other metadata is the same (image names, depth, lat/long, etc.) between them. You can delete the duplicate submissions with broken images after you’ve found the original encounter.
Hi @Anastasia, I am 99.9% certain that these zombies are not duplicates submitted by participants. It seems they are generated by the system somehow. When you go to the actual encounter, the media assets are little gray boxes, not actual images. They are always generated as resurrections of initial correct normal encounters. So there is always a matching original. Sometimes its close in time, sometimes its not. I believe this depends on when the submitter send in their next set of encounters. It somehow triggers the last encounter of their previous set to be zombied.
From my conversation with the devs, the logs point to those corrupted encounters coming from the submitter’s browser. It’s not Wildbook arbitrarily creating them.
Is that true for all of them, or just these latest two? thanks!
Yes, for all of the ones your reported here except for the one where a user submitted a video file instead of an image file. Whatever is causing this is happening from the submitter’s side.
