The 2020 update was for 2019.
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its worth noting that the existing notifications functionality on the web covers more kinds of notifications than the notifications functionality on the app.
itās possible, of course, to do what youāre suggeting, but itās going to look weird because youāll end up either with two different notifications screens that have a ton or overlap, or else youāll have to carve out the stuff that isnāt covered in the mobile app and handle that in an entirely different way. again, itās possible, but itās ugly, in my opinion. itās going to cause more confusion than taking no action. youāre better off changing the bones first.
I can see that that kind of thing would be really complicated! However, what I want seems simple to me ā a way to ādismissā (hide from me) notifications that Iāve seen. If I had that, I could chip away at a big backlog a page or two at a time. Now, I have to check them all at once or else go back through the ones Iāve already checked to find the ones I havenāt seen. Surely that could be added without a total rewrite of the notification system.
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On the website, clicking on the notification bell (correction: speech bubble icon) only to have all notification be marked as resolved is the biggest problem. Having the individual notifications not disappear until read (similar to how iNat Next works) would be the most useful improvement.
I would also like to elevate attention to notifications for disagreements. I do like that iNat Next segregates notifications between my observations and for other peopleās observations, but I would give that up for disagreement notifications vs non-disagreement notifications. This would allow users to quickly recognize and address disagreements and review any other notifications in a more relaxed way. Riffing on the idea, maybe there could be āpriority notificationsā for disagreements AND @mentions.
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DISagreements is why we made the Pre-Maverick project. Including the resolved obs, we have found about one million. 2 agree, one doesnāt. Which side are you on? Who is right?
iNat only lets us find our Mavericks. Too little, too late, CID has moved on and your ID makes no difference either way! A bit untidy, and irrelevant. Or - you will need to @mention a āmore than two thirds majorityā to support your Maverick.
Unfortunately the Pre-Maverick project uses part of @jeanphilippeb 's API call quota.
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as i noted, if you just added a whole new screen it would just look weird and be confusing for a lot of users, i think. they would have the home page updates, the little speech bubble list, and then some new page that overlaps but is different from those two things.
for now, if you just want something that allows you to see notifications in a concise way that wonāt also mark them all as viewed, you can use my page.
in my mind, i think a simpler change than adding a new notification page would be to change the behavior of the speech bubble list when you click on it. instead of automatically marking all those notifications as viewed, just add a button to let the user explicitly mark all as viewed.
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If you look at my original post, I never suggested to simply put the current app notification tabs on the website in addition to the existing ones.
I suggested a specific different breakdown and/or additional tab on the dashboard that would likely be more useful for a lot of people, along with color-coding for read/unread messages.
I only mentioned the app because the app is evidence that the back-end functionality already exists.
I would prefer a complete rework of notifications as well, but given that there appears to be no plan for what this will look like or when it will happen, I donāt think it is fair to ask users to patiently wait another 6 years if there are minor improvements to the existing system that would make their lives easier in the meantime.
Itās great that you and others have provided tools to make some of these things easier, but as external tools, they will not be accessible to everyone ā whether because they are not aware that they exist (only a small portion of users read the forums) or because they do not have the computer skills to implement them. Neither of these things should be a prerequisite for participation on iNat.
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it exists only to create a notifications screen that looks like what you see in the mobile apps, and that covers only a subset of the notifications that you can see in website.
there is an existing mechanism when you view an observation that dismisses the notifications associated with that observation (marks them as viewed), and when you view notifications from the mobile app, thatās the mechanim that is used to dismiss those notifications.
but there are notifications that arenāt necessarily associated with observations (which you canāt view form the app), and thereās no existing mechanism to dismiss those other than opening the speech bubble list in the website to dismiss all notifications. so you canāt just carve those out and then provide no new way to dismiss those. you have to do some additional work on the back end to make something that wonāt be confusing.
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If Iām understanding right, youāre saying thereās a reason your eternal tool just covers observations and excludes notifications for things like comments on flags, journals, or taxon changes - because the back end does not support a notification drop-down that allows them to stay āunreadā? So there is no āeasyā fix to update the system without revamping the whole thing?
Serious failure of communication. What the ā is a āspeech bubble listā? What makes you think notifications get marked reviewed when I click on it? Why would I want that, anyway?
Iām using the website. I see a long list of notifications, including activity on my observations and ones Iāve identified or commented on, responses about flags, observations posted by observers I follow, etc. I want to see these things; advice to turn off some category of them is less useful than intended. I also see a number near upper right that tells me that I have, say, 374 notifications [since I last clicked on the number]. Thatās just a list thatās either present or absent and doesnāt help me find particular notifications. It is a useful warning about how much time I must devote to this ā in one session since thereās no easy way to tell what Iāve dealt with and what I havenāt. (A more or less adequate warning although it ignores observers I follow.) Clicking on the list makes the list disappear but thank goodness it doesnāt mark individual observations āreviewed.ā
Being able to make observations on the main list go away when Iām done with them would be great. Just being able to mark them in some way would be much better than the current system.
I suppose this is much harder to program than I know. Like when people show me a photo of a non-flowering fine-leaved fescue and expect me to ID it to species. Or phone me wanting to ID their processed seeds! (Are they out of their minds?!?) Sigh. Iām sorry to be annoying about it. Iām feeling more annoyed than usual because Iām just back from a week long trip. I hope there isnāt a power interruption or anything when Iām part way through the backlog. Finding my place again is not fun. I do appreciate and save helpful URLās youāve provided to answer some questions I have about the data some times. Iām impressed with what you can do with iNaturalist!
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Speech bubble is your ā374 notificationsā
If you click there, the number disappears, and those are all āReadā.
Yes they are still listed on your dashboard - but no indication if you looked at that one already. Or not.
That we get notified, separately, for every engagement with each obs ā¦ whimper.
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sort of. my tool covers only the notifications that can be associated with an observation because the v1 API that the apps use support only these notifications. thereās a trigger when you view an observation through the standard interfaces that marks any notification that is associated with that observation as viewed, and I think thatās the reason these observation-related notifications can be separated from the other notifications.
as far as i know, thereās no mechanism to mark other notifications (on flags, journals, etc.) as viewed, except for when you click the speech bubble on the top-right of the website. unfortunately, clicking that marks all the notifications that it presents as viewed.
so if youāre gong to carve out and present observation-related and non-observation-related notifications separately, you need to create and/or modify the mechanism that marks all notifications as viewed to be able to mark only a subset of them as viewed. alternatively, or in addition to this, you need to change the speech bubble behavior so that it doesnāt mark all notifications as viewed when you click on it and instead provide a mechanism for the user to to choose when to mark everything as viewed.
if you go with that latter approach, that probably solves half of the problem with minimal effort, but if you do the first thing, then i think that starts to expand the scope of the work to where you might as well just revamp the whole notifications system.
see picture above.
because thatās what happens. iām not saying that it marks observations as reviewed. it just marks those notifications that show up in the speech bubble list as reviewed. iām not talking about the updates that show up on the home page either. thatās the other part of this that complicates things.
i donāt disagree with this sentiment, but as far as i can tell, thereās not a straightforward path to get to that point without either making a mess or investing a lot of development effort.
short of that, the only path i can see that moves you in that general direction without making too much of a mess is what i described before ā allowing the user to explicitly decide to mark all unreviewed notifications as viewed, rather than making that a function of opening up the list.
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We discussed making preference-level changes for now, since that doesnāt really depend on broader underlying changes to notifications and I made a github issue for two preferences that I think address this desire.
The first would be a preference to not see infraspecies IDs that agreed with my species-level ID. The second would be to not see ancestor IDs of my ID that were not disagreeing with my ID.
I believe I would use both of them, personally.
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Thank you!
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Option to turn off notifications for observations added to traditional projects.
I guess this would prevent some observers from forbidding addition of their observations to projects. Forbidding this has bad consequences because a traditional project is basically a list of observations, and lists are a very important basic tool in information technology, they should not be banned.
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That sends a notification?
Yes, I checked it recently and it does.
I sympathize with the importance of lists, but I donāt think that we should assume that notifications are the main reason that users choose to control whether other users can add their observations to projects or not. I think that one reason users choose to do this is to prevent the project badge/banner/whatever the correct term is, from appearing on their observations. I know of instances in the past where users have objected to geopolitical aspects of some projects, or projects for certain affinity groups, etc. appearing on their observations. Iāve also heard people voice concerns that their observations were used for research/action related to some project that they disagreed with (eg, tracking feral cats). I havenāt heard of anyone specifically objecting to the notifications (though it seems reasonable that this is a reason for some).
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