URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: gazillion. Bug report prompted by a busy scientist who has tripped over this twice in my current 20 notifications. (I have @mentioned the intended iNatter for them)
Screenshots of what you are seeing random example. User name is seDGesrock I use @se and that triggers the right iNatter
On the obs display
Step 1: iNat will let us @mention … any … random … string. Does not confirm that THERE IS an iNatter with that user name
Step 2: I mostly notice because … on my dashboard the @mention is NOT blue, not an active link. Goes to the Nuthin Mole or the whale ate my homework
And I recognise the intended taxon specialist’s name from a small pool of the ‘carpet of identifiers’
On the dashboard display
Step 3: But and it is a big but. If you open the obs the broken link is blue. iNat could at least be consistent and show the link as broken both on the dashboard and in the open obs.
Even better if iNat would prompt – There is no iNatter with that name. Check your spelling ?
This is not a bug, this is how @ mentions have always worked in iNat. When an @ mention is saved, a notification is generated for the account that matches the text string after the @ symbol. And the @ mention is turned into a URL includes that text string. That’s it. The @ mention is not tied to a specific account.
@segdesrock does not match an account – it remains grey here in the forum too.
She uses sedgesrock as in – sedges rock. @sedgesrock but the forum does not recognise that ? https://www.inaturalist.org/people/sedgesrock
Keep in mind that the forum is not part of iNaturalist at all, it’s run on software and servers by discourse.org. And @ mentions here work differently than they do on iNat itself. Because they are two totally different platforms.
So my first screenshot, of an obs, where seGDesrock is blue, is a deceptive error on iNat’s part. That blue link is NOT an effective link to a valid iNat profile. It should be greyed out. We should not have to click first, and THEN realise there was an initial typo.
How many @mentions scattered across iNat are dead links from typos ?
