Add project observation updates to dashboard

Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: Website

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:

Description of need:
Describe the iNaturalist community need that your requested feature addresses. Include screenshots, URLs, and other details to help us all understand the issue.

It would be helpful as a project admin to see recent observations to the collection projects I admin on my dashboard so that when I sign in I see something like this.

Feature request details:
In detail, describe the feature you are requesting. This includes its functionality, where the feature is implemented, and what it might look like. Screenshots or mock-ups are helpful. The idea is to have a concrete and actionable request which the community can discuss and vote on. It might change through discussion, but it’s much easier to iterate and talk about something specific.

I admin multiple projects many of which are seasonally busy. I would like a way to know when new observations have been added without having to go to the project. I would like the notifications to be project based because it’s cleaner than following every person in my project or every place in my project and cross checking them.

For example, I administrate the SD Master Naturalist iNaturalist projects which are filtered by user. There are 95 users (so far, the number grows every year) but I’m only interested in the South Dakota observations of these 95 users. The easiest way to keep track of new observations made by these 95 users in South Dakota is get notifications (or maybe subscribe) to a collection project.

As pointed out elsewhere you don’t need the ability to subscribe to a collection project when it is filtered by one characteristic. But when it’s filtered by two or more, (e.g., South Dakota Master Naturalist, South Dakota, odonata larva) then having a project subscription is much easier.

Maybe add this option to the notification management thread as well? We need a nice list of personal settings to manage our notifications.

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The problem is that observations are never added to collection projects. Collection projects are saved searches and that search is only run when the project page is loaded. One of main purposes of collection projects is to reduce background load on iNat, and having the dashboard show updates to collection projects would put more load on iNat’s servers.

Like this project? https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/south-dakota-master-naturalists-2022-cohort If so, you can just bookmark an Explore page for that project, eg https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=south-dakota-master-naturalists-2022-cohort That will search for all observations that meet the project’s requirements.

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Sure, I already have all the projects bookmarked. The issue is notification. The projects will have long intervals when things are pretty quiet then there is a flurry of activity and some of that activity is observations that need input (casual, unknowns, etc) I like to respond sooner rather than later.

But I’m hearing there is no way to get notifications about project updates since it’s only updated when it’s run…

It’s both that and the only way to do that would be for us to run processes in the background, and our plans are to reduce those as the site continues to scale. For example, taxon and place subscriptions are a big load on the system because they’re constantly churning in the background to provide users with updates for their dashboard and/or daily update email. Notifications for collection projects would do the same thing, unfortunately, and exacerbate load. So I’m going to set the request to close tomorrow.

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