Not surprisingly, people on the Forum often refer to their experiences using iNat. It would be very helpful to click to a poster’s Forum profile and find a link to their profile page (or their most recent observations) on iNaturalist.
Update: Carrie Seltzer has kindly added a field for iNaturalist profile. One way to add this information to an existing profile:
o Open a new browser window
o Paste in the URL https://forum.inaturalist.org/u/YourForumName /preferences/profile with your Forum username in place of the bold text.–Thanks, Star3, for this tip!
o Scroll down to “iNat profile”
o Enter the URL from your iNat profile page
o Save changes.
@NancyinSunnyvale I moved your post to this category because the feature request category is really meant for the iNaturalist site. I’m not sure if this functionality (which I agree would be neat) is doable because I’m not savvy with such things but hopefully someone might be able to chime in with suggestions here. I suppose folks could be asked to link the url in their forum profile? Having that automatically linked would certainly be more convenient though.
You could also enter them in the About Me section and use the hyperlink in the formatting box (handy if you wanted to add multiple addresses, eg. link to your inat profile as well as your ebird, bugguide, your flickr, your blog, etc):
Don’t people have the option to join this forum even without an iNat account though? I think I’ve seen past posts by people who said they didn’t have a iNat account yet, or who had deleted their iNat account but still had a forum account.
How would it tie to your iNat login to verify?
Thanks, Star3. I really appreciate your help. It took me a while, though because I didn’t know how to get to the website field. Now I know.
Here are my step-by-step instructions for adding your iNat URL to your Forum profile:
Click on your icon at the upper right.
Click on your name to see the first column.
Click on “Preferences.”
In the column on the left, click on “Profile.”
Now you will see the page shown in Star3’s second post.
Copy the URL at the top of your iNaturalist home page into “Web Site.”
Click the blue “Save Changes” at the bottom.
It would be still cool to have, now you have to copy&paste name and you never know if it’s the same, but you could see a sign that there’s no associated account or a link to it by clicking e.g. on a website sign near forum name.
But it shouldn’t be a required field, because there are forum members who don’t have iNaturalist accounts.
I know I have personally seen messages on this forum from a user who was suspended (but is still an active forum participant), and someone else who announced they were deleting their iNat account.
Thanks so much for this link @NancyinSunnyvale! I just created a new custom field, and you should be able to click on my username here to see what it looks like on my user card (the small box overlaid on a thread) and when you click through to my forum profile. For the time being I’ve left the “website” link I already had to my profile (the address is different but it shows the same result) in addition to the new custom field.
You all should be able to edit your own profiles to add it as well. People new to the forum will be prompted (but not required) to fill it out when they sign up.
Hm, I don’t see it on the card, just on the profile page (for clarity, the URL with the number is from the field called Web Site and the one with the name is from the field called iNat profile). I’m also a little disappointed to see it’s plain text and not a clickable link, but I don’t know if that can be fixed.
What’s important is that, if you simply click on Carrie’s icon – the one that appears right next to her comments – the links are there. [I’m not sure what the “card” is.]
That can be fixed if Carrie or some other staff member can decipher the instructions at https://meta.discourse.org/t/link-custom-user-field-to-external-website/41218. They don’t seem to provide an example or even specify where to paste the code. But I suspect the instructions will make more sense to Carrie than they do to me.
BTW, I am editing the title and intro comment. “iNatForum profile should have a link to member’s iNaturalist page” is no longer relevant.
Being a member of iNat for a whole week and a forum member for a couple of days, I haven’t been involved long enough to be actually confused but I am curious about why a forum that is clearly linked conceptually to iNat is not linked in fact. Maybe I have missed a thread somewhere. If there’s a history embedded in a thread somewhere, I’d be interested in reading it. Otherwise, is anybody able to shine some light on this?
