Most useless iNat feature?

General
1

I am not prepared to read all these answers…

This is so crazy, have you ever thought of it? Disagreements checkbox is one I think is so useless that I have never used them myself.

2

Hello friend. I checked your profile before answering this here. Seeing as you’re 13, I’ll be civil.

This question does not help anything. It does not solve anything. It’s complaining about things that do not need to be complained about. Think before you write stuff dude.

5 Likes
3

Actually I am just curious to know about such features that are rarely used. So I picked up a more catchy title to get answers.

4

Do you mean the disagreements checkbox in the identification filters? That’s for looking for pigs misidentified as magpies, ants as moose, etc. If you find something whose community ID is Animals, and it’s an ant but the first ID is moose, you can help push it to ant and get it to the eyes of the myrmecologists, who can then figure out what species it is.

1 Like
5

This is to see everyone’s personal perspective. Personally, it is not useful to me, so pls. tell what you don’t use often.

6

Personal opinion here:

I don’t appreciate negative click bait on the forum.

There are several iNat features I don’t use, but I know better than to call them useless!

I am positive they were developed for purposes used by others. Perhaps those people are hunting for things or chasing information on subjects that don’t interest me or are “above my pay-grade”, but to call them useless? No.

7 Likes
7

The disagreements filter is very useful. It helps identifiers find observations that need help being pushed in the right direction.

For me, I guess the most useless feature is the Community Journal Posts tab. However, I think it could be made very useful with one change: add a search bar. Imagine being able to use the Journals to hunt down the many guides that are put on there by regular users.

2 Likes
8

The Disagreements filter was added recently, in response to issues discussed on the Forum. That YOU do not yet know how to use it, does not make it useless.

In June https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/disagreements-filter-added-to-identify-page/66032

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/city-nature-challenge-2025-id-residue/67235 54 (useless?) comments

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/reviewing-multiple-older-entries-quickly-to-see-if-they-are-waiting-to-be-corrected-or-refined-to-ssp-or-var/69039/6

1 Like
9

You cannot imagine how many disagreements are stuck (dormant users or observers that never correct their own IDs or they simply forget to check their observations). Especially when people select CV suggestions without a second thought. I love (and hate at the same time) to clean this taxonomic mess up; for me this tool is very useful. It would be nice to have this filter not only in identify mode.

As mentioned above, useful is not defined by how often you use something, but how much it would help if you’d used it.

1 Like
10

Well, actually i wasn’t aware of “disagreements filter”, that’s incredibly useful when working on a specific taxa !

2 Likes
11

If nothing else productive comes from this post, hopefully it brings the disagreements filter to more people’s attention. It’s a great tool- I use it to filter for insects at the “Pterygote” level with disagreements to see Order-level disagreements. I might not be able to get beetles or stink bugs to species level, but I can at least add an ID of “Coleoptera” or “Heteroptera” to move them toward the correct order for experts see them. I’ve done thousands of order-level IDs using the disagreements filter like this.

2 Likes
12

I also find it good with higher level IDs to help pick out the ones that people have (potentially) been able to ID enough to disagree with. Of course, there are also ones that just started with a wrong ID and got kicked up higher, but it still seems to me to tend to have a higher percentage of ones I may be able to help with than the general population at that level.

As for the most useless feature, it’s probably one I don’t yet know about - and maybe if I found it, I’d discover it’s the most useful!

I’m likewise not a fan of clickbait-ish titles, but such a question does have the potential to bring ‘more obscure but potentially useful if people knew they were there’ features to light.

1 Like
14

Hi, as the iNat Forum is not a place for unconstructive complaints, I’ve unlisted and closed the topic.

If you want to post a new topic framed in this manner, feel free.

3 Likes