Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: web
Description of need:
Implement a way or mechanism to top ten identifier user that do not want to tag them in observations.
Feature request details:
Implement a method or mechanism for users whose profiles appear in the “top ten identifiers” section at any taxon level but who do not wish to be tagged for identification purposes. It would be useful to have a way to indicate that these users do not want their profiles displayed or included in the top ten list. The “Top Ten” section automatically includes the user profiles that are most prominent at that taxonomic level, but not all of those users necessarily want their profiles displayed there; when they are tagged, they find it annoying and label the tagging as “mass tagging.”. Many thanks in advanced.
I think this is a valid issue to try and address, i still get tags on things I’m some how top on the leaderboard that I really don’t know much about. The leaderboards also include your identifications on your own observations.
Wouldn’t having a “please don’t tag this person for IDs” marker on someone be different than not having them on the leaderboard at all?
(I haven’t seen the prior discussion- I don’t know if that’s been covered before.)
Might you consider adding a note (do not tag for IDs – thanks) to your profile.
iNatters who care to tag, will also be more likely to check your profile.
Where are you based ?
What taxa are you interested in ?
I usually check a profile before tagging to assess whether the person SEEMS amicable to a tag, because some people are snooty as heck.
I’ve run into someone similar who has made 500-1000 IDs of a single species. The tag wasn’t asking for an ID but simply “is this the right direction?” and of course I got a typical and classic curmudgeon-y reply about how they do “not know much about X species” - with attitude mind you. well if you don’t know much about it, why are you on the leaderboard and have that many IDs?
make it make sense, this is a public app, with public data. You, as an observer are a part of a public data collection app. Do your part or find another app??
I do think having tag notifications should be in the messages notifications rather than ID notifications or even their own notification section. And I think if responding were made easier, people would feel less annoyed and more open to guidance.
In your example, it is a bit odd that someone who confesses to have little knowledge of the taxon should be on the leaderboard. I am on the leaderboard for a few species that exist in different parts of the world. I can identify them locally because I know that nothing else around here looks like them, but I don’t know if that is true on the far side of the world. There are only so many hours in the day and I’m not particularly interested in becoming an expert on the fauna of far flung locations just so I can identify what I regard as boring and annoying species. It’s bad enough that I have to identify them locally. When I respond that I can’t help someone, I state that it’s because they’re on a different continent, and I’m ignorant of what’s going on there. Is it possible that something like that happened in your case, and maybe they just didn’t explain the situation very well?
Some of us may not want to be on the leaderboard but we don’t have the ability to opt out (I wish I could). It can be frustrating to wade through a bunch of tag notifications that you can’t actually help with (and have to explain why), on top of some very demanding ones where you can. Folks who do the tagging can also be snooty/entitled at times, so the identifier you’re contacting may be feeling curmudgeonly for good reason.
At least, that’s my excuse.
(my profile is almost entirely composed of various admonitions about tagging, yet I still get tagged inappropriately)
I mean, what kind of numbers of tags are you getting? I find it hard to believe anyone is receiving over 10 tags a week. I really don’t believe people are being overloaded with tags, I think it’s just folks who don’t want to interact with others on the app, and that’s totally fine to admit.
maybe in addition to the leaderboard there is a section for people who don’t mind to being tagged and opt in to being a local expert on guidance and education of X Taxonomy. if it is a growing issue. It’s funny, because I mentioned making tags of the leader board recently in another topic and then this topic “magically” became an issue for people that needs to be fixed.
There are something like 400,000 active users every day, most of them observers. For the thousand or so users who have made hundreds of thousands of IDs (500th identifier by quantity is currently at 140,539 IDs), it’s not uncommon to see a user mass tagging global top identifiers of their taxon (even really obscure ones) once or twice a day. For years. See e.g. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/show-top-identifiers-by-continent-by-default/15310
I should note that I get a lot of tags for things I can ID and want to ID. Shutting off all tags just to get rid of the ones I can’t help with won’t work for me.
Every time I identify an observation, I’m interacting with others. Usually, it goes no further than submitting the ID, but often, I get asked to explain, or I’m forced to explain when someone submits a conflicting ID. Writing those explanations takes time. Folks who end up on the leader board may be spending a lot of time doing identifications, following up on questions, etc. I generally spend several hours per day doing it. I review somewhere between 50 and 60,000 observations per year. This is free labour I donate to identify other people’s observations. I don’t even have time to submit my own observations.
I often have a long list of notifications to go through every morning when I log in. Some are nuisance notifications generated by comments that folks have added to observations I have identified (“nice photo!”, “lucky you!”), some are tags with comments directed at me just saying “thanks for the ID” (I guess they don’t realize that I’ll get a notification of any comment and the tag is superfluous), and some are things that I might need to pay attention to, like notifications of disagreements, questions from observers, etc. If you have more than about a dozen notifications since your last login, it can be easy to lose track of some because the system doesn’t work very well. So some folks are touchy about unnecessary notifications. They might contribute to them missing something important. And the notifications often don’t quite make sense (you appear to be getting a notification for one thing, but when you click on it, it’s really something else). So you have to check most of them even if they look like something you can safely ignore. People who get a lot of notifications have a lot of pent up frustration with the system in general. That frustration is going to spew forth any time the topic comes up, because the system somehow never gets fixed.
It’s probably a long standing sore point for some people. Apparently it has been discussed before, but I haven’t seen those threads. So when I see the topic of leaderboards now, and I hear that it has been discussed before and the possibility of opting out of the leaderboards was rejected, it rankles. It seems that iNat bends over backwards to accommodate certain folks, but those who do a lot of identifying get ignored. This is likely because identifiers are not a huge demographic (which is a problem in itself), and nobody can point to an important metric that will be negatively impacted if identifiers grow more disgruntled. This is why I once suggested that the small number of people who contribute the bulk of the identifications should band together and “withhold services” until our concerns are addressed. I would imagine that if identification suddenly stopped, even iNat staff might be forced to sit up and take notice. Maybe.
That profile has been edited since they retired. But I remember one which said – if you @mention me more than once a day, I will block you. For a taxon specialist the notifications can stack up to a mountain! (not all are @mentions but they make the mountain that much HIGHer)
