Is there an easy way to filter to only people you follow on the identify page?

General
1

I was thinking about submitting this as a feature request but if it’s easy enough to do with a workaround maybe it’s not worth the effort.

I enjoy seeing what people I follow are posting and like to identify things when I know them if they haven’t reached RG yet. Currently I do this on the updates page which is not very efficient. In the past I’ve gone through and manually created a URL for the identify page to do this by entering the username of each person I follow, which wasn’t bad when I followed 30 people but now I’m up to nearly 100 which would take a good chunk of time to compile and would be difficult to keep up with when I follow a new person.

My title is a bit of a misnomer because the answer is probably no but I’m sort of testing the waters here if there is any thought it might make for a good feature request. The difficult part about creating a search url is the compiling of usernames, so really the question for an “easy way” is more about whether or not it is possible to export a list of usernames of people you follow. If something like that is exportable to a spreadsheet it’s not too hard to make the link from there.

2

Not that I’m aware of, but another option is to make a collection project with their usernames and then filter for the collection project, e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/cassi-s-inat-workshop-attendees / https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?project_id=43563

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3

Personally I already find it creepy that I cannot prevent people from following me, so the idea of being added to the filters of a project I didn’t join sounds even worse.

4

(https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/restrict-your-observations-from-appearing-in-someone-elses-collection-project/18502)

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5

I use a custom URL of the type https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?order_by=updated_at&place_id=any&user_id=follower1,follower2,follower3 where you replace follower1,follower2,follower3 etc. with the folks you are following (or who are following you). It takes a while to put together initially but once you have it saved/bookmarked it’s easy to get back to and modify by adding/removing folks from the list. I like to occasionally check if any of my followers have posted stuff in my area that I missed during my regular ID rounds.

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6

you can always use tool like Power Automate Desktop (free to use with Windows from the Microsoft Store) to scrape the users from your Following page.

here’s a video that shows the general process to use Power Automate to extract data from a web page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgBZiBIgh3w

here are the specific instructions to extract the Following users:

  1. open Power Automate Desktop
  2. create a New Flow (name it whatever you like)
  3. add a task to open your Following page (https://www.inaturalist.org/people/natemarchessault/following) in a new browser window.
    a. go to Browser Automation > Web Form Filling > Launch new [your browser of choice]
    b. when asked for parameters, leave most of them default, but add your following page URL as the initial URL parameter value.
    c. click save.
  4. go ahead and run your flow at this point by clicking the play button in the top bar. this should open a new browser window that shows your Following page.
  5. back in the flow window, add a new task to extract folks you follow.
    a. go to Browser Automation > Web Data Extraction > Extract data from web page
    b. while the task parameter window is up, go back to the new window you created in step #4.
    c. right-click on the first user’s login, and select the option to extract the text from that element like so:
    image
    d. repeat 5c for the second user. this will fill in your Live Web Helper window with the first 20 or so users from the Following page, like so:
    image
    image632×787 18.1 KB

    f. now scroll to the bottom of your Following page, and right click on the Next button. select the option to use this element as the pager
    g. in the Live Web Helper window, click Finish
    h. in your Extract data task window, set the Extract from parameter value to All Available, and click Save.
  6. back in the flow window, add a task to export the users to CSV.
    a. go to File > Write to CSV
    b. set your data variable to %DataFromWeb%
    c. select a file path and name for your file.
    d. when your parameters are filled in as shown below, click save:
    image
  7. (optional) Save your flow
  8. Run your flow by clicking the play button
  9. Look for your CSV file, and open it
  10. if everything looks okay, close your flow, and close Power Automate.
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Yes that’s what I have done historically but manually compiling 100 usernames is somewhat daunting.

Thanks! I’ll have to give this a shot. I appreciate the detailed explanation, too.

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