Agreed! This has been encouraging to see.
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I’m sure that when the iNat crew saw this thread getting so many lengthy response so quickly that their stomachs sank a bit! I think it’s actually a positive though. To have so many users so invested in the platform. The users know that the developers actually care about their opinions and will hear them out. I was tempted to post earlier, but then had trouble just keeping up with reading all the responses. Many others have already expressed my thoughts for the most part.
I’ve gone back and forth on the idea of adding confirming ids to observations that were already research grade. At first I didn’t even look at research grade obs, until I stumbled across quite a few that were misidentified. Then I figured that if I was going to look at them anyways I might as well add an id even if it was just confirming. It would provide some protection for future id changes and notify me if it happens. But, then I realized that sends out those annoying notifications unless people have changed their settings. It also makes me climb the identifier leaderboard of a given taxa, and people might think that was my goal. I agree that just marking as reviewed instead of agreeing is not ideal for reasons already stated, but I started to do it most of the time anyways.
I still use the agree button a lot though because my process is to filter for needs id, and a single species in a range. Then I either agree or correct, annotate, and then switch to a different species… then filter to the genus, family, etc. I find it much quicker that way and I am much less likely to make a mistake when I can look at the majority of the observations while only thinking of one species at a time. I’m sure that’s not how the experts do it though. If I didn’t do it some of those observations would sit around for weeks or months. I know as a newbie I was excited to get the input of others quickly. The non-experts among us can handle the easier ids to clear them so that the hard core experts can key out the more difficult ones. The agree button helps a lot with those quick but easy ids.
If people are using the agree button just to climb the leaderboards, then I agree that those types of agreements just shouldn’t go towards your id count. If more than say three people already made that id, the subsequent identifiers can still add an id, but it won’t add to their count on leaderboards or prominently display their name and icon. It could just say “x more people agreed.”
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Just to be clear, I’m not proposing taking away the ability to change an ID to agree, just not having the Agree button appear in this sitation (as was done for all RG observations over the weekend).
The OP would still have the ability to change their ID to match other reviewers (I would definitely not want to take that away). They would just need to do it “manually” by entering the species name, again taking an extra 5-10 seconds. I think this could be desirable as observers would need to think briefly about the ID rather than just reflexively clicking agree.
This isn’t super high on my personal wishlist, was just throwing it out as a potential option to address some of the concerns around usage of the Agree button. Maybe it’s a bad idea!
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Ahh i see, misunderstood. :)
Yes, I could also imagine this could be beneficial… especially in addition to a visible withdraw button 
Without a withdraw button, it would worry me that the original ID would be simply left to languish, taking longer / involving more IDs to resolve a single observation.
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Yeah, I think that sounds interesting. I know I’ve been guilty of doing that on occasion, and maybe a tiny bit more friction would encourage me to leave the observation stand until a second party confirms it.
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Wow, so I’m guessing this will get lost in the general “agree” comments, but is there someway that the ability to use < !-- – > to provide invisible text can be restored? It’s a minor thing, but I had some basic formats and notes hidden in some of my guides when those segments weren’t ready yet. I’ve went back, found several, and deleted them, but it’s a bit of a pain to do so and it’s useful to be able to hide the new stuff while I’m reformatting an old guide.
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<!-- --> seems to work in observation comments, but then your problem occurs while:
i thought that guides were no longer supported… so if they won’t fix things there, then if you’re just working with text, you could always insert it into a sketchy attribute tag on a random html tag. i think iNat strips those out for security reasons. for example:
not working?
blah <!-- test -->blah
then try this:
blah <img onclick="test test test"/>blah
this won’t solve the problem of having to find existing cases of <!-- --> though.
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Thank you iNat staff for listening and reverting the change.
I will say I am disappointed there was no sincere apology to the community for the aggravation and frustration your actions caused.
Even if staff feels they are correct and only changed because of pressure from the userbase (which is the feeling I am getting from the comments from staff) it’s important for all of us to acknowledge and apologize for our own actions that have caused other people to put forth more work.
I also hope staff truly seriously takes a critical eye to their own thoughts and actions and dig deep to determine why they were so completely mis-aligned with the expectation of the userbase. That’s the only way personal and professional growth happens.
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Oh, come on. iNat staff tested something out for a couple days, got some blowback (a bit over the top in many cases, I might add), and they reversed it. Hardly a major crisis requiring a personal reassessment of anyone’s life or actions. I give them credit for trying things that might help correct existing problems with the site, even if they ultimately fail to do so.
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Interesting. It seems like it’s working now. Just so you know, most of the guides I have are in journal post format. Glad to have it back. I wasn’t looking forward to going through them all and removing the hidden text.
By the way, I’m really happy that the iNat team made it easier to format text. This will save me some time when I ever get back into creating guides for the site and should make it a lot easier for someone unfamiliar with HTML.
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That’s your choice - I choose to live my life where I recognize and apologize publicly for my actions, even ones made unintentionally, that negatively impact others, and I will encourage that behavior in organizations I interact with.
iNaturalist is a free service. I don’t see why they should apologise for trying improve something they are giving us for nothing.
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We have been thanked for our patience and feedback, and the negative impact acknowledged and mitigated.
I don’t feel anyone was over the top in their responses. When change happens or is desired, there is a need to speak up about it, and especially in these type of forums there is a need to make an important point heard above the background noise.
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I would disagree with any methodology that attempts to make a user look absurd and find that counterproductive to the mission statement “our primary goal in operating iNaturalist is to connect people to nature, and by that we mean getting people to feel that the non-human world has personal significance, and is worth protecting.” If a person is just starting out (with birds for example) and is only confident with robins, cardinals, and mallards, their participation should be welcomed at that level. With encouragement and over time we all know that you can’t help but be drawn into expanding your horizons. Conversely, If you make them feel stupid, chances are you lose them as a contributor completely. It is the responsibility of those who “know” to help teach those who want to learn. My two cents for what it’s worth.
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While you are right in general, I feel that you are misinterpreting the spirit of @charlie’s thought. A hypothetical person with hundreds of thousands of ID’s is not ‘just starting out.’ If all their ID’s turn out to be easy agreements to ‘robins, cardinals and mallards,’ being prominently displayed on an ID leaderboard is not particularly helpful to other people looking for expertise.
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Since I mentioned the notifications as being a problem for me, I will just clarify–the setting to not receive notifications that exactly match my own (which I have selected) does not help me because anyone who (1) does not agree to subspecies identifications and (2) also does not want to receive notifications of subspecies identifications, will still get those notifications. (That is, I currently have to receive subspecies notifications because they never match my own identification which will be at a species-or-higher level.) As I said, though, I am happy that, at this time at least, it appears that the new notifications system may allow me to opt-out of subspecies notifications. I think the result of this topic is the best result after reading all the comments, but I just wanted to clear up why the setting to not receive IDs that exactly match mine doesn’t accomplish my particular goal.
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oh ok. it looks like you can use formatting = simple or none in the journal posts. so if you use none, then the <!-- --> seems to work, but not in simple.
I got some info from Ken-ichi and it apparently only works if it’s on its own line. This is copied from that correspondence.
some text < !–this does not work-- >
< !–this does not work-- > text at the end
< !–but this works-- >
More here.
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I’d almost wonder: would it be more viable to have this as a toggle under user settings? That is, existing users would automatically have the “agree” button operating as it has historically, while new users would essentially “opt in” to use it. That might help prevent duress users from abusing a feature (as there’s probably less desire to check settings) without affecting existing and established workflow (and I would presume users who intend to remain on-site would be more likely to look under the hood, so to speak). Just considering whether there’s an option that might have a better balance to it (help prevent one problem without opening another, unexpected problem).
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This is probably a two-fold difficulty for users from where usage frequency maybe less. From my experience in creating IDs for observations in India mark down is quite difficult anyway for two reasons. there is no geographic filter for species suggestions continent wise or country wise secondly nomenclature followed on inat is not from popular usage and its sources for common name are nearly non-traceable for many taxa groups so its nearly not useful till a point. This means species suggestions are typically of the US first mostly - leading to more misidentified species and one needs to know scientific names at finger tips since inspite of knowing scientific names where possible irrelevant species are frequently suggested. So one needs to look up on google and copy paste full scientific names.
I haven’t been providing Id much after this feature has been added so cant tell much specifically to this. but this difficulty comes to mind from both providing ID and reviewing perspective.
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