Currently I mainly use iNat from my computer to identify mainly birds, and I check the alerts from the icon in the top right corner where they come up. However I find it slightly irritating if I happen to click off the alerts or close the tab etc, then I lose all those alerts and haven’t been able to find a way to access them again. This makes it hard for me to reply to people’s comments and subsequent IDs that they have put on sightings I have identified. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
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If you go to your Dashboard, you should be able to see them there. To the right of the notification icon you are looking at, there is an icon for your account. Hover your mouse over that, and the first item is Dashboard.
I agree - I get the same behaviour and it’s quite frustrating as I do like to follow-up on almost all my notifications. So I’ve found two ways to work with this:
(i) starting at the bottom (oldest) part of the notification list, I right-click on each item and select “open in a new tab” and work my way up the list (skipping any ones that I know I don’t need to follow-up on). Then I end up with dozens of open tabs and work through those one by one, closing each one as I have read it or processed it.
(ii) When I accidentally left-click on one of these notifications, and it takes my browser to that notification (and seems to wipe all my new notifications, as you point out), it seems that I can use my browser back-button and go back to the page I was just at, with all my red notifications reinstated.
I do wish we had better control of the notifications. Like having them disappear (or to no longer appear red/new) only once we actually click it or mark it as ‘read’ or something. And it also would be nice if we could break-down or (colorize/categorize differently) the various types of notifications … I always want to follow-up on a comment, I always want to follow-up on a disagreement. I often want to look at an ID that improves upon my ID, and I rarely want to look at IDs that simply agree with my ID… when we get hundreds of notifications, it would be nice to just ignore all the “agree” ones.
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The problem with this is that when we have 150 new notifications and we want to make sure we don’t miss any, it if not clear how many red/new notifications there were when they are all wiped out, and it’s not clear how far down the dashboard list we should go to ensure we get them all.
I used to go down the dashboard in the times that I lost my notifications - as described - and I would keep going until I reached ones I knew I had reviewed before, but that would require repeating bunch of observations I had done before.
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Maybe try this as a workaround?: https://www.inaturalist.org/comments?mine=true
@nastos you should be able to disable notifications for ‘agreeing’ IDs in your Account Settings (2nd option down under ‘Notifications’).
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Thanks - it’s not that I want to disable them, but that I rarely want to look at them. If I have just 5 notifications for today, I will still review them all, but when I have 150 notifications, I want to be able to skip all the agreements.
So I still want those notifications, but it would be nice if I could easily skip past them. Like in the list of notifications, we see either “X commented on …” or “X added an identification to…” it might be nice to have it say “X added an agreeing identification to…” or something like this.
Also, I always want to view 'agree’ing IDs in the cases that an identification disagreement is working itself out.
Also, sometimes people add comments on their ID in the box “Tell us why…” which does not register a ‘comment’ notification, but sometimes just an agreeing identification, so that’s another reason I don’t want to skip those in all cases.
As for /comments?mine=true - sometimes we want to follow discussions that we have not added a comment to ourselves, so comment?mine=true doesn’t always capture what we want to see.
I find this incredibly annoying as well. It’s not unusual that I might come back from an extended field trip and find that I have 200+ notifications to look through, and my usual strategy is as @nastos detailed above - open them all in a new tab. It’s a bit unweildy but I have no problem doing it that way, but occasionally I’ve accidentally clicked away etc. to find that they all just disappear, never to be heard from again. This is incredibly frustrating, especially when there are potential disagreements I’ve missed seeing, or people tagging me in sightings for an ID.
Going to the Dashboard is useless because I follow a number of people and projects, and the notifications all get drowned out by people uploading sightings. The fact that the Dashboard only shows a few things at a time before I need to click to the next page is also incredibly frustrating, and I barely use the Dashboard because of it.
I strongly agree that we need some better way to access notifications - perhaps something similar to the page that shows all of your messages?
By the way @nastos, Ctrl+Click opens the link in a new tab automatically :D
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We have been promised better management of Notifications for 3 years …
I work down my dashboard. But that is also weird, the clock ticks back, then I get some from ‘yesterday’ but have learnt to keep scrolling down, to where the clock is still ticking for today!
At very least we should have a function to sort out and access again
- mark as read
- keep unread
- seen that
And also to sort the list logically
- agree
- disagree
- comment
- @mentioned me
- fave
- tags
- annotations
I can do that for email or in Feedly for the blogs and websites I read.
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It is possible to work through most notifications individually using the app. If I get a lot of notifications over night, I first go through them in the app, if they don’t look like a disagreement.
The remaining ones, I open in the browser as separate tabs.
By this workflow, I am able to pre-filter most notifications I consider to be worth looking at in more detail
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There are many threads on the forum that address this question already and reading through them could be valuable. Here’s an example:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-handle-a-growing-number-of-notifications/34735
which contains a link to a site that allows you to view notifications. You can also turn off confirming notifications if you wish.
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Thanks for the comments - I agree with most, seems that the issues may not be fully resolved yet but will keep trying my best to get to everything :)
in case you missed it from the thread cthawley referenced above: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observations_updates.html
not sure exactly what you mean by this, but this is probably the thing that will need to happen to provide a better workflow for notifications in the system: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/notifications-on-inaturalist-please-share-your-ideas/374/202.
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