Display who added an observation field

Adding observation fields can be quite useful, and I am a user who allows others to add them to my observations. When someone else does add a field to one of my observations, it would be nice to know who that user is/was, particularly if they are adding a field that makes an associated species ID like host plant or prey species.

Screen shot:

My screen shot is from this observation:
https://inaturalist.ca/observations/3896993

for what it’s worth, you do get updates in your homepage that show who added an observation field. those can get lost in the stream of other updates. so, alternatively, you can get the information from the API’s observation details and observation search endpoints.

for example, you can look at the results returned by either of these API requests, and look for the ofvs section:

it’s not super easy to parse through the API results. so something like this could provide a more human-friendly view of the results that come from those API endpoints: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_print_friendly_obs.html. (just input your id, and click the query button.)

in the case of the observation noted in your original post, it looks like you (arborsphere) added that particular observation field (or, perhaps, you were the last person to have modified it?).

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That’s interesting. People don’t often add fields to my observations, but I do have one and it does show the name of who added it right under the “Info” portion of the drop-down. I wonder why it didn’t on yours…

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that’s a good observation. i guess the info pop-up will only display who added the observation field if the observer was not the one who added it?

i can confirm that i see who added the field in a case where someone else added it on my observation:

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The information is also available, in the form of the userid number in the json of the observation record (which can be seen by just adding .json to the end of the url such as https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66857258.json) if you dont want to interact via the API.

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Yes, I modded it, but after I took the screen shot I posted here. The species-level entry, posted by someone else long ago, was apparently wrong. And, as you can also see in the screen shot, there was no attribution shown. Either way, it looks like my “feature request” already exists. Why it didn’t show in the example I referenced is now the question. Did that user delete their account? Does the attribution not go back to older observations (mine was from 2016)? An issue with my browser (latest Firefox for MacOS)?

Thanks everyone, btw, for your comments and replies.

Made an issue for this here: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/2934

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You should be able to see who added an observation field in any situation now. But I’ll leave this request open for another day or two, let us know you come across any examples where this isn’t working.

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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Adding or editing observation fields reports wrong user