Apologies if this has been asked recently, but the most recent discussion of this I could find was from 2019, so may be outdated.
Is there any way to not automatically follow observations that I add an ID to? The notifications from it are super annoying when all I want notifications about are my own observations (+ mentions etc), and if I identify a lot of observations then unfollowing each of them manually will take a lot of time. In fact, this is one of the things that makes me averse to identifying, which isnât good for anyone.
Whilst not an answer to your question (apologies), a good reason not to automatically unfollow observations youâve identified is that if your identification is wrong, you will never see the conflicting IDs, comments etc, and therefore you wonât have the opportunity to retract your ID (meaning that it will take more identifiers to correct the community taxon).
If you only ever identify easy taxon where thereâs no real room for doubt, this is less of a concern. But if youâre identifying invertebrates, plants, etc. even taxon experts can make mistakes or have room for conflicting opinions that can be corrected, let alone rookie identifiers just hoping to contribute. Leaving notifications on in this case is pretty imperative to ensuring you arenât making bad contributions that create more work than if you didnât identify at all, and provides the opportunity to learn more from followup comments or IDs.
Thatâs frustrating, especially considering this isnât a new issue - like I said, I found threads about this exact issue from 2019.
a good reason not to automatically unfollow observations youâve identified is that if your identification is wrong, you will never see the conflicting IDs, comments etc, and therefore you wonât have the opportunity to retract your ID
I feel like the solution here would be an option to only be notified of conflicting IDs on othersâ observations, rather than having to choose between no notifications for confirming IDs on my own observations and getting lots of superfluous notifcations/having to manually unfollow all observations I ID.
Instead of opening the notifications one by one, you can use the above instead. It shows all the observers in chart form, so you could just open the ones with your own name.
I really appreciate all the workarounds that everyone is suggesting! Itâd still be very nice to have this as a native notifications setting though, since I like getting notification emails (and none of the workarounds apply to that).
As tiwane said, that applies to all observations, not just those by others, which would also stop notifications for my observations (which is not what I want).
If youâre using the website, you could identify someone elseâs observation, then click the down arrow next to âFollowâ and unfollow it. Itâs a bit clunky, though.
But the Community taxon algorithm is also a pain between insisting on more than two thirds, and Ancestor Disagreement. For example
Your ID is wrong. Needs 3 more identifiers. Irritating.
Your ID is wrong. And someone agrees with you. 5 cross identifiers!
One of the wrong hard disagrees at I know it is A Plant. Now we add Ancestor Disagreement to ANY plant IDs. The queue of identifiers wonders why âtheyâ never withdraw their wrong IDs.
If you are sure your ID will not be an issue for future identifiers? Unfollow. Or ID more thoughtfully, where you do want to follow the discussion?
In the context of this discussion of present and future IDs, my understanding is that the dreaded Ancestor Disagreement is no longer an issue because itâs now handled properly - right?
(Not disagreeing with your overall point that keeping track of disagreements in case youâve made a wrong ID is important, but can we not make things sound worse than they currently are?)
For a page thatâs entitled âClarifying ancestor disagreementsâ, Iâd have to say it left me more confused that I started. My understanding was that it used to be that a disagreement with an ID automatically disagreed with anything finer than the new ID (which makes no sense, and I thought was what was referred to as âAncestor Disagreementâ). Now, though, I believed a disagreement only disagreed with anything directly on the path between the original ID and the disagreeing ID. Is that approximately right?
Iâve never understood why I canât follow ALL notifications for my own observations, and disagree-only for othersâ observations. I want to know if Iâm wrong about an ID on someone elseâs observations. And I want to know EVERYTHING that happens to my own observations, including confirmatory IDs, because thatâs useful information for me.
With IDs for others, Iâm cautious, and generally only give IDs Iâm extremely confident of.
With my own IDs, I often put a lot of work into trying to figure them out. I want to know if that work has been successful! Also because Iâm vain, and get a big kick out of finding out I was right. ;-)
This has always been such a major pain point for me also. I am doing quite a few IDâs for others and if I leave active the notifications for confirming IDâs then I get tens or even hundreds of notifications every day, which will also hide any useful notifications about disagreeing IDâs and I will just miss thoseâŚ
However, if I turn off confirming IDâs then I will no longer get notified about IDâs on my own observations, which is something I would always like to have.
So I ended up turning off confirming ID notifications, but still hoping some day there could be a distinction between notification settings for my own observations and for ID made for others⌠e.g. only get notified on disagreeing IDâs on othersâ observations and get notified about everything happening on my own observations.
I donât think there is any feature request related to this for nowâŚ
