I just recently delved into the option of creating a “list” . Sort of thought it would update my personal observations so that I could check things off my list- but there doesn’t actually seem like a way to do that - in spite of a box labeled how many you have “observed”? Reading through the forum here- the consensus seems to be that it’s a declining feature that is no longer really supported? If so why is it even an option?
See this blog post for more info: https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/43337-upcoming-changes-to-lists
But basically, yes, you’d make a “life list” and iNat would try to update the list based on your observations. However, in practice that didn’t often work well, and as the site grew, the background processes that would run and add taxa to your life lists were bogging down the site. So now when you make a new list, it is entirely manually updated by you. Or, you can go to your Dynamic Life List and filter it how you like.
That box is vestigial, and we actually plan to remove it since it doesn’t do anything any longer. But it’s a low priority issue, so it might take some time before it’s removed.
It’s still supported. I’m not sure what you mean by “declining”.
I actually quite enjoy my lists. I just kind of make them for fun, but it gives me a reason to explore and learn about new species.
you could make a feature request that would add taxon list as a filter option in your dynamic life list page (ex. https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/pisum). then the dynamic life list could display only the taxa that exist in the selected taxon list, and when a taxon list is selected, the unobserved pane could be modified to show only taxa from the taxon list that you hadn’t already observed.
if the feature request goes nowhere, then maybe one of the third party developers who like to make browser extensions could make such modifications to the page via an extension?
i thought about modifying my own page that can display dynamic life list data to do this sort of comparison, but getting data from life lists currently requires authorized requests, and i don’t want to add an auth flow to that page. it’s possible to display items from a dynamic life list that are included in a taxon list without authorization (ex https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observations_taxonomy?user_id=mercedes-fletcher&list_id=4360078), but displaying items from the taxon list that aren’t in the dynamic life list would require authorization.
taxon lists can be used for other things. for example, you can filter by a taxon list instead of by a taxon.
I have found multiple uses for Lists: My personally recorded birding lifelist which records a lot more species than my iNat bird lifelist. Some gall lifelists based on host plant. Several checklists which are non-taxonomic groups or include species in certain areas that don’t have observations yet on iNat. A list of native species that may work in the paludarium I’m making. Also this one just for fun in which I made a list of the species of birds illustrated by Elizabeth Gould that are seen in this article: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/07/15/elizabeth-gould/ .