Platform(s): Website Description of need:
Sometimes it is hard to remembered the usernames of certain users to @ but I know I have recently @'ed them, or I am lazy and don’t want to type out the number of characters required for the current drop down to suggest the options
Feature request details:
When mentioning another user in a comment or identification notes, display (5?) most recent tags (from session?) after @ is typed in before any other characters are typed.
This might not be easy to implement, it would have to track and remebered mentions by a user, I hope it’s not too difficult to implement or too intensive to operate?
i’m not for or against the request since i would probably barely use it, but if you’re going to display the last 5 users:
there probably needs to be a way to remove individual entries from that list
there might need to be a way to turn off this feature in the account settings
i assume if someone were to mention more than 5 users in the same post, then i assume your proposed feature would just take the last 5 users mentioned in that post as the most recently mentioned.
this sort of functionality strikes me as the sort of thing that might be handled best in some sort of browser extension.
It can be annoying to get a flood of @ mentions. It seems like this feature would only encourage people to repeatedly tag the same users over and over.
(Most of the time when I tag people I am tagging other specialists to help get an observation unstuck or to check my reasoning. Unless I know a particular user would want to see an observation or set of observations or we have an understanding that I should tag them on certain things, I try to mix up who I tag so that one person is not getting all the notifications.)
Beyond that, the comments in the previous feature request about how tagging should require a minimum of thought and effort apply.
It does need to be easier to find people to @mention.
Not any random person, but I remember ‘someone’ is interested in geckos in Madagascar - very random example because I know there is an iNatter who uses Phelsuma, and yesterday … an obs for that (day geckos) came up.
If you are only ever working with a small group of taxon specialists - fine, but if you are sorting thru Unknowns across the web of life, and across a continent.
Add to that - the list frequently does not offer the observer’s name.
It seems like a list of most recently mentioned user names would not be helpful if one is looking at observations across a broad spectrum of taxa, because the one you need may not be one you have used most recently.
An extra problem is that iNat will let us @mention any random string - iNat does not check if there is an iNatter called @Epiphany
Which is another reason why @mentions get ignored. You did not call me
In the ID popup @mentions are glitchy and unhelpful. It works better if I … open that obs in a new tab.
Here in the Forum it is efficient @s immediately offers you first!
Again, given that this is a thread for a feature request, it would be useful to not just point out what the current system does badly, but what concrete improvements would look like.
Perhaps some sort of whitelist-filter where a user can decide who can tag them and then only get notified for those tags would address this or completely turn off notifications for mentions?
Personally, I almost never get tagged (but then I’m no top-IDer of any frequently observed taxon, nor an expert on a particular taxon in a particular area) so I’ve never had this issue.
I do agree with concerns of overtagging, eyekosader has a good idea of a whitelist
but the existing mute functionality already does that sort of:
Muting someone prevents you from being notified about any of their activity, including “@” mentions, messages, or comments and identifications on your observations.
I think there are differences in tagging
I do agree with spiphany’s main motives “I am tagging other specialists to help get an observation unstuck or to check my reasoning”
Some names I remember for certain taxa, weather I follow them, know them personally or interacted with them many times, but others I forget my brain can’t remember everything, but I do know I have tagged them before and they would be willing to be tagged again.
What I do currently in those situations is remember the last observation I tagged, try to find that and then copy over the name, maybe my brain is better at remembering taxa and locations that string of characters that represent someone.
Maybe instead of being found in the dropdown of suggestions you could see your tag history somewhere on your profile, like how you can look at comments you have made, or search for mentions of you.
Because most of the time the username I am forgetting was probably not within the 5 most recent but more like 20.
True, though this works more like a blacklist. I feel like whitelists would be generally less work to maintain if you want to mute a lot of people. I do not know which of these approaches would work better here and it probably depended on the individual.
If you only wanted to be tagged by fellow taxon specialists, then a whitelist would probably be preferable, but if you simply wanted to mute spam-taggers and still receive all other mentions, then muting is likely better.
A white list wouldn’t necessarily help. I don’t mind being tagged if it is relevant. But not all users check whether the taggee is active in the region in question, and some users will tag half a dozen people at a time, or tag me 20 times in quick succession. Unless there is a really good reason for doing so, this is usually a waste of time for everyone.
So I am not in favor of changes that would make it easier to tag people without a bit of thought. I would be in favor of changes that would make it easier to determine who has relevant expertise.
I do put that thought in, and there are many others who do as well, and making it easier for me to tag would not lessen the amount of thought I give before mentioning someone.
Making it easier to tag would improve the quality of observations by getting the right people to see the right observations. Yes, I could keep my own record of people I tag and their expertise/interest, but I thought this could be something other people could benefit from.
This is a case of certain people ruining something for everyone.
Your argument against it seems to come from a personal history with a bad experience and I would appreciate it if you looked beyond that.
I don’t think this is an isolated experience. Other identifiers and myself have expressed very similar concerns on other threads discussing proposed changes to how @ mentions are done on iNat.
Even if I am an active identifier in the region, if it is a species I regularly ID, I roll my eyes when someone tags me in an observation that is less than 2 days old just for a confirming ID. I would have seen it in my feed anyway, not that they would or should know that, but I think tagging should be reserved for more pressing needs, old observations that the mentioned identifier might have missed, or to resolve disagreeing IDs. Now if they do have a pressing need (e.g., they think they have a regional/seasonal rarity, need to fill in a datasheet, etc.) then I have no problem with them tagging me for a quicker response provided that the comment explains a little context for my own gratification/greater sense of contribution.
I am critical because it seems like the main effect of your specific proposal would not be to help users who do put thought into tagging, but rather to help users who don’t: It would make it really easy to repeatedly tag the same 5 people on lots of observations.
At the same time, it does not seem like it would actually do much to help users find or remember relevant people when they have a good reason to tag them. As you noted yourself, there is no guarantee that the person you want would be in the last 5 people you tagged, or even in the last 10. Or maybe the person is someone who ID’d an observation for you but whom you have never tagged before, etc.
I wonder if what you want would be something more like a function similar to “following” where you could add people to a personal list of relevant/interesting users, with the difference that it would not subscribe you to their observations.
I think it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to achieve this while at the same time preventing spammy tagging. It’s not that hard currently to find the potentially right people to tag:
People just tend not to do it because it requires more than one click. (On an unrelated note, it’s interesting that we humans are so opposed to clicking, even though doing it requires basically no effort at all, but anyways…)
I think if this list is made any easier to access from an observation, you’d get an increase in spammy tagging, even if it is for the correct taxon in the correct location.
But perhaps replacing this section…
The other issue with the leaderboards is that they display users who have contributed IDs to observations that have a particular community taxon, not users who have added IDs for that taxon. So people who add lots of higher-level IDs that are later refined may find themselves on leaderboards for taxa they have no idea how to ID.
From what I understand about how the statistics on the Explore page are calculated, it might be difficult to change this (because all of the tabs are based around the data associated with the selected set of observations – they are not calculated separately, so it has to use the observation IDs). But it might be worth looking into whether there is a way to use actual ID statistics on other places on the website.
You do see the irony in saying you’re too lazy or don’t want to do something as minimal as that when you’re asking someone else to do something for you?
