Ideas for "Your Recent Projects"

Currently, if you click on the Community menu, you will see a “Your Recent Projects” section, eg:

As many have noted, this often displays a fairly useless list of projects because it’s showing projects that you have made and projects that have recently been updated (eg a new journal post).

So, what criteria would you want to be used in this section? Keep in mind that not all criteria are things we can use, but it would great to hear some ideas.

2 Likes

Probably just recently added an observation to in order of most recent… If i made a project i haven’t added to recently, i don’t want to see it.

4 Likes

I don’t think we can do that for collection projects, however, because the observation is never actually “added” to the project. But I think it would be a good metric for traditional projects.

I haven’t yet made a project, so I use that list to review observations from projects I’m interested in. For my use, I would like to see them listed in order of newest observation added (most recently active). Another option would be to list them in order of my most recent posting to a particular project from my own observations.

I’d like to be able to just choose my favorite projects so I could have quick access to those.

18 Likes

I think it would be nice to have an option to show my projects in alphabetical order. I have a lot of them, and it would be easier to find the one I want if they were alphabetical. (If I wanted one to be at the top of the list, I could name it something that starts with A.)

  • If this were actually the case, it would be one way of sorting collection/umbrella projects. I have an active collection project with a few journal posts in 2019 that does not appear on my list of recent projects, but some inactive ones from early 2018 do
  • Recent journal posts
  • Comments on journal posts
  • Changes to project settings
  • Admin/Project Curator changes

And:

  • If I’ve viewed the project, if you can track that…
  • But yes, if I can manually select which appear there, which I’d like the able to, that should override any automatic sorting
  • The header navigation could just say Your Projects, and that text could link to https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/user/bouteloua (which, @janetwright, sorts them in alphabetic order). I would like to see all my projects on a single page there.
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I agree. I have 20-30 projects that I’ve created and only about 5 that I need to actively manage at any one time. I’d love to be able to pick favorites so I could have a short cut to those projects.

5 Likes

I would think for the quick dropdown a simple weighting by those you’ve visited the page for most often in a recent timeframe would make most sense.

The one I always want in the dropdown is the current rutgers spring 2019 personal bioblitz. I’ve gone to the page frequently in recent history. For some reason the dropdown I get consists of project pages I almost never visit and finally at the bottom the page for the rutgers bioblitz… from 2017. How is that the one that comes up?! Whatever algorithm is picking the “your recent projects” list is apparently not actually basing them on any recent activity.

1 Like

i think the simple thing is just to add an optional date range and a mandatory active/inactive flag to a project. the dates would be helpful for things like BioBlitzes and could even serve as the basis for something like a calendar (if you were to also categorize those kinds of projects in a standard way). the flags would help you put projects into dormancy. so the “Your Recent Project” list could just sort by active/inactive (actives first), date range (undefined and active ranges first, future ranges second, past ranges last), and then alphabetical by project name. if you want to get fancy, you could sort by date of most recent activity instead of by alpha name.

the date ranges and active/inactive would also be useful for people searching for active projects to get involved in.

2 Likes

As an interim improvement, can it be made to actually show projects recently made or updated (e.g. a new journal post)?

Two categories that expand into their own box when clicked/hovered. Managed Projects and Active Projects. Active projects would be traditional projects recently added to or joined.

I think being able to modify the order myself would be the most useful for my purposes. This way not everything would have to be based on the same criteria (e.g., I could include projects that I own but aren’t very active, projects that I’m interested in but don’t actively add observations to, projects that I’m especially involved with but don’t own, etc.). This seems like it should be way easier to implement than choosing criteria that will work for everyone, although perhaps there should be some default behind the scenes to make it useful for people who don’t want to mess with things at this level of detail.

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