An iNaturalist friend ( @johndreynolds ), across the border in Canada, tells me he is involved in a bioblitz project there, and gives me the link. I go to the project website, which has a Canadian inaturalist.ca address, and when I go to the website to help with identifications, that he and the project want, I am effectively stopped at the border by what seem like the border police, and I am asked to log in again with my iNaturalist username and password before I am allowed to add my ID’s. (At first I didn’t know whether or not they would only accept an iNaturalist Canada user name and password, that I never had.) It was irritating, and I didn’t even remember what user name and password I use for iNaturalist, as my laptop has long known it. I was initially inclined to just forget it, skip helping with ID’s, and go on to helping with ID’s for the countless others that would value it, without asking me for my credentials, but after checking the project website to find nothing about only wanting Canadians to contribute, I went ahead and found my user name and password, and logged in with it, and it let me help with identifications, but I continued to resent having had to log in separately to do so. This isn’t how the project wants it to work (and my friend should know, as he is one of the project administrators), and is not the way I would expect iNaturalist would want it to work. Or is this what iNaturalist wants? I don’t know if it is relevant, but Firefox is the browser I am using.
Each network site is separate and iNat doesn’t automatically redirect URLs from different networks. If you want to do it yourself, you just have to change .ca to .org, e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/regional-parks-snap-share-2022?tab=about
There is already an existing feature request for automatic handling of domains, you can vote for it here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/stay-within-your-inat-network-affiliation-domain-when-clicking-links-to-other-inat-network-sites/6898
And if you want something automatic before then, you can use @benarmstrong’s instructions in that topic.
It is based on the link they shared. Just change the .ca to .org and you shouldn’t need to log in again.
Same project with the .org: https://inaturalist.org/projects/regional-parks-snap-share-2022?tab=about
I may be able to remember to do that in the future, but I would expect others would still run into the same problem with trying to offer ID help to other iNaturalist projects with national iNaturalist web addresses. I also would prefer to not have to change the web address to help with identifications for projects with national iNaturalist addresses.
Then vote for the linked request.
I looked at the linked request, and didn’t fully understand it. The dialogue seemed to use too much of what I might call “internet / computer jargon”, that I don’t follow / understand very well.
There’re different websites within iNat network, so you can’t stay logged in when you go from iNat.com to iNat.ca, request is to automatically change the link when you click it, that’s pretty much all. Observations are the same everywhere, they don’t change when you go from one website to another. So
makes little sense, you id it here, it will be ided everywhere.
I went ahead and voted. I assume it is what I would want.