I know this feature has been requested before however I think the response of “use the Find function” is not a very good solution as it still does not allow you to search through all the journal posts and can be quite long and annoying before you actually find a journal post you are interested in.
All the journal articles that I have found were by mere chance when I was searching through observations (e.g https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/77188416). In the comments was a link to a very useful and informative post discussing the identification of Gasteracantha in Australia’s tropical savannah zone. I would not have found this article using the key word search. I understand that by following people you can receive notifications when they make a journal post, however I don’t really want to follow every person on iNaturalist from Australia just so I can be notified when they make a journal post that I may be interested in.
I am proposing that a search bar, similar to the search system used in the iNaturalist forum, be created to help users sort through journal posts. Also, when users make journal posts, there should be a feature where they can add/tag key words (E.g spider, Australia) as a way to make it easier for members to use the journal search system.
In my opinion, journals are such an important way to connect users on iNaturalist, through the promotion of projects and surveys, sharing useful identification material and even just interesting posts about people’s outings which can help foster greater community engagement and improve the users’ experience.
So people are able to sort through journal posts by searching for key words and or tags, preventing them from having to scroll through all the journal posts before they find something that interests them.
I did not see the other thread before I wrote my post, but am happy to transfer over to that thread.
This sounds a sensible request, for that page @tiwane.
I am not sure if that meets the OPs goals, but in my case I would (also?) Love to be able to search a single user’s Journals, or a single Journal, to find past references to eg a species or phenomenon. Being able to pull up posts for a certain year or month would be invaluable too. At present I find it difficult to access, say, my own post/s for August 2018 in the Gahnia Grove Journal https://inaturalist.nz/projects/gahnia-grove-site-summary-and-discussion/journal EDIT…I just did that successfully…dont know what my problem was previously, maybe in getting back to the main Journal page where the Archives are available at the bottom.
I really feel that this feature would improve long-form communication between experts and amateurs on iNat. As it currently stands, looking through journal posts is unintuitive, you can’t search through them effectively. It’s a deterrent for new users.
Since most users aren’t aware of the iNat Forum, it’s hard to present a lot of information to an audience without first creating an observation and discussing in the comments. This limits available topics since they have to be related to the observation itself.
There should at least be an option to filter topics, possibly with an algorithm that recommends journal posts to a user’s interests. Either this
One of iNaturalist’s main goals is educating the public on nature and improving the ways users interact with each other’s journals can be a great way to further that goal!
there is a search bar on that page, but, it searches across iNat - not as expected like here in the forum, where search IS within forum posts. Disconcerting till you teach yourself where it is going to search.
Hi @tiwane, has there been any advancements on adding a header search for the journal page? I think this would be a great feature if it was able to detect keywords or perhaps even tags which people add to their posts. Thank you!
We didn’t add a search bar to https://www.inaturalist.org/journal. With the current implementation, it might work OK, but eventually wouldn’t be able to work as the number of journal posts grow.
Did this change just add the standard search bar (that doesn’t look for journals) to additional pages where it did not previously exist?
Or did iNat add a way to search for journals? If this one, I am having a hard time figuring out where to locate the search bar and/or use it correctly to search for journal posts.
Thanks! I was able to locate the search bar at the bottom of my journal posts, above the archives. Maybe the location difference is due to my browser: Chrome for iPad.
That page needs a journal-specific search. It can keep the general iNat search that’s there now, but we need the ability to search within the journals too.
Journals are useless without a search bar. Also, viewing an entry and then going bac results in starting over from the very top of the feed, which makes looing for or at anything not at the very top of the feed annoying.
