Hi Chris. thank you for your thoughtful suggestions. As a new user I’m using the site as a learning tool more than anything else. I spend time “exploring” other observations around me and looking around at the fungi posts.
Your right, I do like mushrooms. I guess I am still nervous about IDing things unless I am 100% sure of what I’m seeing so am erring on the side of caution.
so long as you follow up notifications, when others disagree - it is part of the learning curve.
Sometimes people are kind and explain, why I am wrong and they are right.
I’m being diligent in keeping an eye on my dashboard and correcting when someone disagrees. I am mostly doing coarse IDs so there haven’t been too many - mostly slime molds vs fungi 
Well, considering the series of unfortunate events plaguing the world, I think I might help out in the unknowns for a bit, to keep my inat activity a bit more fresh!
Does anyone know whether observations listed as an inactive taxa come up in unknowns? Is there a way to search for them specifically? I’m currently running across more inactive taxa than anything else I can deal with in my UK overview.
I dont believe they will. Inactive taxa are still grafted taxonomically so they remain assigned to an iconic taxa. They are just ‘turned off’.
I have now looked at all the backlog of needs id for the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, and have moved onto the Unknowns for Africa (following the tips above). Is there a way to exclude specific countries when you’re searching? I suspect as South Africa has comparatively many observers, it would have people specialising in South African unknowns, so I might be of more use ignoring them and keeping to less well-represented countries.
will do Africa except the Republic of South Africa. I should warn you that the user who prompted the discussion above still has a significant number of these records from outside ZA, in fact they are likely the highest volume contributor of them. I would strongly recommend either learning their user icon to avoid their records and the subsequent confrontation touching them will lead to, or doing the exclude user trick noted above in reply #142 in this thread.
Please - we need help IDing in South Africa too.
Not many botanists, but MANY plants.
You guys have some pretty amazing plants, I must admit.
I’m already doing the “above trick” (and I recognise the aforementioned person), it’s just an idea I’ve been wondering about for a while, South Africa isn’t as high a proportion of the continent as I was expecting.
I’ve decided to stop adding coarse IDs to unknowns, as I’m tired of the rude replies and the lack of support in dealing with them. I’m going to pursue other projects on iNaturalist instead.
That said, I did discover a new way to deal with those rude replies: when someone posts one, just delete your ID and any other notes. Then their rude note is sitting there apropos of nothing, making them look like they’re ranting to themselves in an empty room.
You’ll be missed. I often saw you had handled an unknown before I had worked my way to it. I’ve hadn’t had to many rude replies, but I do avoid high observation count users if the observation is relatively new.
Sorry about that! I’m sending you a virtual sympathy bouquet💐.
Thanks a bunch for all you’ve done so far, it has really made a difference!
Maybe move to another region or choose one? I’m not a true expert, but with this situation I have to id a lot, I focus on Russia only and so far had zero rude responces, usually there’s no responce at all, so maybe choose territories with no known users with negative vibes.
I say just ID as you would normally. Anyone complaining about someone who is putting high level IDs on their obs can either put the high level or whatever ID they feel appropriate themselves from the outset, or just ignore their alerts feed until they have sorted out their IDs. Another option, if they are concerned at missing important alerts, would be to have a second account for uploading the observations, and then when they have them the way they want them they could ask iNat staff to bulk move that extra accounts observations over to the main account. This is of course all in lieu of iNat releasing it’s new and wonderful alerts system which will either solve or worsen the problem!
I’ll try to fill your boots when i can. You’ve definitely dragged a ton of obs out of the unknown section for me to elaborate on. I’ll have to pay that forward more often.
I’ve definitely been called a jackass more than once for calling a tree a plant, but that’s the stuff that keeps the site going. I haven’t done as many unknown IDs yet though so I could only imagine if I gave it more time.
Have you considered upgrading things from kingdom to class or something along those lines? That’s usually my niche, and I don’t have to worry about being told off by people wanting data to remain blank.
I love the idea of finding an id niche within broad classes. There are definitely people looking for records that make it to a certain level, that they can often refine much farther. Like, if you can recognize something is generally an orchid or euphorbia, or maybe a gall mite or a leaf miner- you may see activity relatively soon after you push it to that level, due to the experts “standing by.”
I hope I never counted among those rude responses – I’ve definitely benefited from your IDs. Thanks for your hard work.