I am subscribed to several species and genera that I follow. On my iNat Home page feed, these show up in irregular bunches; sometimes one at a time, sometimes two to several grouped together. Altogether, I’m typically looking at 20 to 50 observations per day.
Q: Does anyone know how the bundling of observations for the Home page feed is done? Is a timed thing (e.g. every hour)?
I ask because there seems to be an inefficiency in the way they show up on my Home page. I would probably like to see them bundled in fewer, larger groups.
I don’t have a problem with getting numerous little batches, but what I don’t like is that if you miss seeing one, the next new batch you get only links you to those new observations, not the ones you missed. Thus, I still have to click “Identify” occasionally and then query the taxon I follow to see if any missed observations have accumulated.
It would be nice if any link to new observations of a taxon you follow would just take you to any new observations you haven’t reviewed yet.
Are you speaking of the notification balloon in the upper right part of the Home page? That one dismisses notifications after the first viewing and I concur that is frustrating. But I’m speaking about the full list of notifications on the Home page, which retains older notifications; one needs to just scroll down to see older ones and click the “More” button if needed. That’s the bundling I’m talking about.
I was wondering the same thing. Sometimes I go back to the home page and there are new things in a bundle and sometimes there are new bundles (from the same location/person/taxa).
In this part “created_d1=2025-07-15T12%3A07%3A54-0500”, “2025-07-15” is obviously the date and “-0500” is probably the time zone adjustment. I think “T12%3A07%3A54” is supposed to be the time 12:07:54 (the start time). So the end time would be 12:11:52.
I can’t find a more authoritative source but I believe this is an accurate description of how it’s done:
It will only show the equivalent of up to 50 notifications. For example my current feed is:
In total those add up to notifications for 48 separate observations, but they’re clustered together into 8 updates. Sometimes someone will upload 50 observations all at once using the web uploader and you’ll only see one update on your page, you have to click “More” at the bottom to see the next set of 50.
Edit: Reading back I think I answered a slightly different question than the one you actually asked! I imagine there’s a timer running that starts new bundles every couple minutes but not sure about that part.
Yes, that is the expected behavior of the observation feed when you are following particular iNatters and the display limit is 50. This is analogous but not the same as what I’m seeing with subscriptions to species and genera. The latter bundling is the subject of my question and this thread.
Ah so in my example the place subscription is a subscription I have for Drosera in Ontario. The older bundle of one observation is from 1:52 pm and the newer bundle of 3 observations is from 2:05 pm (now that I have newer updates that bundle has gone down the feed and been split up over the “More” line). The next observation in my feed from that subscription is from 10:16 am.
You could maybe figure out exactly what timing is used here by subscribing to a taxon that constantly gets tons of observations.
Probably it’s every few minutes now, and might be better split up by 30 or 60 minute collections?
Pretty sure it updates every 15 minutes or so. As to the bundling I see the same thing but I’m not sure exactly how it works. Subscriptions are pretty old.