To encourage more identification… I know others have dismissed this idea but I would love to see a forum section for ID requests. It would need a few rules to stop it from getting overwhelmed, for example: observations must be older than a month (by upload date) before ID help is requested the use…

[image] grace_sibley: There is just not much back-and-forth discussion that happens in the comments of observations There’s often more than you think! Sometimes it’s just a matter of asking identifiers why they made a particular ID, what characters are important for that species, etc. Most id…

I agree with @thebeachcomber . Often my comments/questions/musings on mine or other people’s observations don’t get a response, but over time…and lots of observations…I have had a lot of discussion, learned amazing things, occsionally helped amaze someone else, learned to ID more things, and along th…

Aside from the fact that it goes against the iNaturalist flow, the sheer number of ID requests in that forum would chase away people who know how to ID things. Doing it from a forum would be WAY more work for the IDer than going through the normal iNaturalist flow. If the observer knows something a…

I have doubts whether a forum “channel” for ID would work. But I do like the idea of a place to bring up “cold case” situations. Perhaps if there was a limit to how recent the obs is, like it has to be 6 months old or longer, before it can be raised in the forum? However, it would be good to be able…

It’s interesting to see the range of reasons why people want priority ID help, but I think the existing system is reasonably designed to take care of most of these. Asking for help by tagging particular identifiers and explaining your case is a great way to learn. You don’t want to be the person w…

There is already a Discord that may be what you want for this. Besides general chat areas in it, there are channels for ID. More info: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/unofficial-inat-discord-server/904

[image] kiwifergus: I think if there was the ability in iNat to set one of your observations as being your “feature observation”… and have a page that includes everyones featured obs all together. Similar in concept to this feature request , which was ultimately rejected as too complicated to …

I actually like your idea better. The way I envisage it working would be that you could set ONE observation as your “feature” or “priority” observation, and while it is in the needs ID pool it would be brought to the front no matter how old it was. Once marked reviewed, it would drop out of the need…

I’m just concerned that a section for ID requests here would actually have very little impact on getting things validated. Only a very small percentage of overall iNaturalist users are active on the forum, and many of the folks who are active here are already high volume observers and/or identifiers…

Yes, I’d like to keep ID requests to the current system on iNaturalist, or to improve it on that site, rather than use the forum for this purpose.

Create Forum category for ID requests

Forum Feedback

jdmore September 2, 2019, 8:33pm 11

Similar in concept to this feature request, which was ultimately rejected as too complicated to implement. Maybe your suggestion would be a simple enough alternative?

Topic		Replies	Views
"Request ID Help" button Feature Requests	33	2062	March 12, 2022
Create a way to see that people want explanations on IDs Feature Requests declined	30	1437	October 10, 2023
Making identifying more fun/interesting - wiki General	24	4503	June 30, 2021
Flag Erroneous Identifications Feature Requests	27	1857	August 12, 2020
Proposal for a new filter option: the 'ID tips' button General web	58	1680	March 29, 2025

Create Forum category for ID requests

Related topics