Just to be clear, I’m not opposed to making it easier to see if a user has been active recently, but I agree with Jeremy that detailed and thoughtful responses help everyone, not just the observer, and probably encourage genuine new participants to engage and improve their future observations, and level of activity isn’t really a great indication of how “genuine” someone is.
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i don’t know… consider this observation, one of which i’d see dozens of similar ones in any ID session (except when i filter for my curated observers list):
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/518748
it appears they wrote in ‘lettuce’ with their blurry photo in 2014, resulting in a nonsense ID that a single glance at any ID resource would contradict, mapped it sloppily to a huge 5 km uncertainty circle (they can’t find their own house? maybe they wanted to obscure but…) then left the site after adding just 7 observations, never to return in 5 years. The point isn’t that this is a bad person or something, but they clearly didn’t make iNaturalist a priority at all, either in making their observation or being a part of the community later to see if anyone had any ID help. I did leave little comment blurb there, but i just don’t think it’s worth anyone’s time typing out a detailed response to why a photo of a blurry wet plant is not Claytonia parvifolia.
I get it that maybe i am too much of a grumpy ‘old’ man about this stuff, or that i am not supposed to care about data quality as much as I do, but I am just having a hard time imagining how spending my limited time on something like this helps anyone ‘connect with nature’ or advances conservation in any way considering there are almost 7 million observations in need of ID (not to mention research grade ones with 2 IDs that could benefit from a third) and they are piling up far faster than anyone can review them.
It has nothing to do with level of expertise, but i do think it’s worth reserving extra effort for those who actually care to be a part of the community.
And on that note, I should stop here, because I think it’s pretty clear where i stand with this and in the end, if this feature request isn’t implemented, it won’t be a big deal. Thanks all.
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+1 for the point about colour blindness.
What is the purpose of assuming a normal distribution? And what is the random variable that we are assuming to be normally-distributed?
I’m with you. I would rather ID than comment.
I keep my longer comments for AFTER they have reacted. Copypasta works for the worst bits.
Could also make the note go the other way.
John Smith has NOT been active on iNat for 6 months.
Save your breath to cool your porridge. He don’t care!
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As always, there are exceptions. There was a multispecies observation that went to RG on the 1st pic. I commented to other IDers that it should be ided it at a higher level taxon, because the user hadn’t been active in 6 months and might never be back to remove the 2nd pic…and I guess they saw a notification for my comment, because they immediately removed the other species pic.
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Still it’s wiser to spend that energy and time by adding more ids and only add copypasta or learnt responces and not create wall of explanation for a user who won’t see it, chances of someone else visiting an observation are close to zero, especilly with current growth. Your example fits copypasta very well.
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Oh definitely. In addition to a like to the frequent responses, I have unpublished drafts in my journal of my own boilerplate
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I have a text expander
since observer has gone, dormant
And once - someone bobbed up - no no I am here!
After further discussion we decided to not move forward with this. It’s possible to see when someone was last active on their profile page.
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