Is there a way to see previous (already viewed) notifications?

Sometimes I clear all my notifications, but I later in the day want to go back and pull up the page for a recent notification, and I can’t figure out how to do it. Unlike virtually all other social media, like FB, IG, Twitter, and Tumblr, I cannot seem to access a full feed of all notifications.

Under the newest notifications there is a link “View your dashboard” but when I click that, it shows me.

The best I’ve been able to figure out is checking all the notifications until I have none, then reloading any page, and re-opening the notifications tab. This seems to usually show the most recent 10 notifications, including ones I’ve already viewed. Sometimes this is sufficient and I can find what I’m looking for. But if what I’m looking for is more than 10 notifications back, I’m stuck.

Is there something I’m missing here? I would expect this to be easy to access, somehow, but I can’t figure it out. I also tried searching these forums but didn’t find any previous post about this, so apologies if this has already been discussed.

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Of the four tabs on your dashboard, “All Updates” has every notification, in the same order as they were in your notifications dropdown.

This is not at all helpful.

My notifications list, in order, links to:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/90039693#activity_comment_cbcdc273-d510-4f89-a98b-95a42d200bc2
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/90039693#activity_comment_9cd1fe55-3739-424b-a860-1f5701c9f9ec
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/52819890#activity_comment_b721144a-cca2-4acc-b45d-8dea1b0bdb50
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/61711654#activity_comment_abf59d20-4aaa-478f-83ff-43c23ab3ae42

The fourth one here was the one I was looking for.

However the “All Updates” tab does not just have notifications, it has a ton of other stuff and the notifications can be buried very far down. For example, the first three items in “All updates” are about people I follow adding new observations.

Then the fourth item is the first notification above.

Then there are four more items about adding of observations. Then I have to click “more”.

When I click “more”, it doesn’t just load below, it clears the page and shows more items individually. So I cannot repeatedly click “more” and then use the in-page search to use a keyword to locate a notification I remember. For example I was searching for the fourth notification which was about a scarlet oak identification. So I would want to search for “scarlet oak” but I cannot load multiple pages. And I don’t know on what page the notification is.

Looking through the second page I have four more “user added observations” posts.

Then the third page? four more such posts.

Fourth page? Five more such posts.

Fifth page? Four more such posts.

I have now looked through a whopping FIVE pages of results and I haven’t even gotten to my second notification. How many pages do I need to look for to find the buried notification? Who even knows. I don’t have the time to go through this stuff. For all I know it could be 20 pages, or 100 pages? And if I miss it? Well then I’m totally screwed. I have to be actually reading each and every one of these items to make sure I don’t miss it.

It’s completely unusable for the purpose of finding the buried notification.

I want a list of notifications and only notifications, just like appears in the pop-up on the top right when I click the notifications icon.

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This tool may work for you:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-there-an-easy-way-to-open-all-notifications/25913/35

I know some people find the Android app good for looking back through notifications.

5 Likes

Thanks, wow! It took some fiddling but I was able to get it to work and it is very fast and does exactly what I want!

I’ve bookmarked and can now use this!

Side note, this interface is so clean and snippy, relative to the mind-numbingly sluggish iNat interface, which makes me think that it is packed with unnecessary bloat.

I’d love if iNaturalist would have this sort of feature built-in. I’d love even more if the whole site were a bit faster and more responsive…when I use it I lose huge amounts of time to just waiting for it to respond.

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Would be nice if there was a tab with only my own notifications.

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Generally I am receiving notifications both on iNat and my email box. It’s very convenient because they will sent them as email in time every day so that I can check it by date. But a bad thing is that notification will fill up your email box…

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Yes, and I have them turned off for this reason. It’s frustrating though that turning them off leaves me in the situation where I can potentially lose track of notifications without consulting an external tool.

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I find that having notifications only on iNat is sufficient. That way, I see a count of them whenever I log in or refresh the page.

That would be great and I would prefer this solution if it were possible to consistently / reliably view already-viewed notifications. As I explained above, I’m not able to do this on-site.

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