I just noticed that my dashboard notifications have “agree” buttons for Research Grade observations, but not for “needs ID.” Is that relevant to this discussion?"
I think observations at rank genus and coarser don’t have Agree buttons.
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So it seems like some of the same issues we’re voting on here (identifying without being aware of comments and photos of multiple organisms, etc.) would be applicable there.
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Well presumably you have interacted with the observations showing up on your dashboard already in some way. Completely new (to you) observations wouldn’t show up there. So the presence of the agree button in that case is not as fraught as it is with the identify modal, where you (mostly) encounter observations that you have never seen before.
Not to say that the dashboard couldn’t be improved, along with notifications, but the I’d leave that agree button alone.
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What about subscriptions to places and taxa, and following people? But I agree it’s probably not as big a problem.
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As of right now, they don’t show agree buttons. Just View, Identify, and Show more.
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Yes, you’re right. I should have checked them myself before asking. So I agree–not a big problem.
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Perhaps this is a yet another topic. But, on my dashboard notifications there are “agree” buttons for observations for which I have already suggested an ID, including my own observations. So, I would be agreeing with myself?
I clicked one (because I like living on the edge) and it took me to the observation. Nothing changed about the observation. My original ID was there, in the original order.
No danger of the errant “agree”, where this topic has gone. But the Dashboard should check to see if there has been an ID for that observation from that account. I think the only time an “agree” button would be useful is if there was another user with a subsequent ID that was more refined (and not disagreeing). If there were disagreeing ID’s, that presents a whole other (very minor, not worth its own thread) topic of what should appear on the Dashboard if the ID’s don’t agree (as in and how many options from the observation page should show on the Dashboard).
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I first also had that problem. I thought that the page was about agreeing to the thumbnails, rather than clicking on the thumbnail and opening the identify programme.
For a beginner it is not intuitive that this is just a summary page and that the identifying tool must still be opened. All the thumbnails have the agree option and this throws beginners.
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It’s kind of both, Tony. If the first image is detailed enough in the thumbnail, you can agree to the ID without having to go in and look at the identify panel. It is advantageous for those that know taxa well enough and ID large volumes, but problematic in that you don’t see the additional photos and/or comments/descriptions, which often have an influence on how you would ID the observation. Obs that have multiple photos of different organisms, or that have been commented as being duplicates, that sort of thing!
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100% true! Took me a couple of years (while still new and relatively inactive) to finally figure out what this “Identify Modal” thing was that people were talking about, and how to access it. Before that, I had either been agreeing to the thumbnails (yikes!) or right-clicking on each obs to open it in a second tab.
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A version of this idea came up in another discussion too: make the “Agree” buttons unavailable to new users until they’ve been on the site for some time (a month?) or made a certain number of IDs (50?). Instead, new users would have to type in a name to add an ID. This could help encourage the habit of more thoughtful identifications, without reducing the ease of use of “agree” for more established users.
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It looks like a lot of people want the Agree button on the thumbnail page removed at least sometimes. Is there an open feature request for it?
I don’t think there is, if you want to make one?
Done – now I just have to scrounge up a vote from somewhere…
I usually ID european birds, and there are some quite distinctive species (eg. european robin, common blackbird) that I can easily ID from the thumbnails. even so I mostly only use the agree buttons when I am looking through research grade posts, and whenever I see something I can’t tell from a small image I’ll open it bigger.
I just found out that there is an identification method on iNaturalist in which only the first photo is shown and comments are not shown. This method involves just identifying off the panel in the Identify tool without actually going into it. (It has been here a long time probably, but I never noticed the “Agree” tabs right on the panel.) This makes me think that there should be a separate DQA category for multiple-species observations to immediately take them out of “Needs ID.” (Same for duplicate observations.)
That explains a problem I’ve had repeatedly had where I submit an observation with my ID explained in the comments, usually citing a recent paper on the species, and then others disagree with the ID as if they hadn’t even read the comment.
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Hmm, couldn’t be, because in the situation described there, there is only the opportunity to agree, not to disagree/enter in a different ID.
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That’s relatively uncommon (though they’re brought to attention here because they can take more effort than normal to “fix”). It would only account for the IDs that are piling onto initial “incorrect” IDs. It doesn’t account for most cases, which is when people failed to read (or sometimes intentionally go against) what the observer had described.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Remove “Agree” button on Identify thumbnails in certain cases