Allow people to make personal notes about other users

Feature Requests
1

Description of need:
I often find it difficult to keep track of multiple people on iNat, specifically which people to @ for observations and when, and etc.

I feel that it would be a great idea to add a personal note you can add to any user, viewable only to you, that allows you to describe or explain them (Ex: this person knows a lot about Mosses, this person is great with responding quickly, this person has X observation, and many other things I haven’t thought of.

This note could be for followed people only, or anyone, viewable in followed Users list, etc.

2

This is an intriguing possibility, especially for those of us who have trouble remembering…people, at all.
I want to rope my pal @sambiology into this discussion because he seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of who to contact for what. I don’t know how he does it.
Sam?

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3

(You didn’t vote on your own request yet)

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4

I’d definitely use a feature like this!

I keep a draft Journal post to help me remember people. Along with that, I also keep snippets for comments I leave in IDs that I use repeatedly.

However, you always have to be sure to hit “Save Draft” and not “Publish” when you make changes. :wink:

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5

Presuming your personal notes are friendly ? Lots of people make a list on their own profile of who they like to @mention for what.

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6

Hahah – no trick, just thousands of hours on iNat seeing lots of the same names on the same taxa. Then, something magical happens – when I’m outside and see that organism, for whatever reason, that person also pops into my head! :)

Every dragonfly I see, I get a reminder of greglasley’s Profile · iNaturalist ! :)

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7

Alternative: You keep a list in another program (Word? Excel? The notes feature on a cell phone?) and consult that as needed.

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8

For what it’s worth, Mastodon (the open source decentralized social network) incorporates a feature like this; they call them “personal notes”. I find the feature very useful.

9

I agree with sedgequeen that there are existing tools that could do this, such as pretty much any spreadsheet or word processor. For example you could pin a Google Sheets tab in your browser so that it’s always available as a reference. Personally I’d want iNat’s engineers/designers to spend more time on functionality that couldn’t be as easily accessed outside of iNat.

13 Likes