Many identifiers (even those with many 1000s of IDs) assume that observers are notified of comments within IDs. As far as I am aware this is still not the case. Following a conversation with another user though, I just wanted to check if this is true.
Other than the main dashboard notifications which you scroll through, do any users receive notification of comments inside IDs? It seems definitely not to be the case on the notifications dropdown in the browser, right? But how about on the new iPhone and Android apps?
I realise this has been mentioned before, but its been subsumed into the bigger notifications ideas thread which hasnāt been updated in 5 yearsā¦. and yes, the phone apps have changed a lot since thenā¦
Kinda, but not exactly. Say I add a confirming ID to your observation with a note on the ID:
If you have āConfirming IDsā toggled off in your settings, you should get a notification that says ā@swampster added an identification to an observation by youā, even though itās a confirming ID.
If āConfirming IDsā is toggled on, the notification will look no different from your usual notification of a confirming ID.
This is about notifications for comments within IDs. Not notifications for IDs themselves.
Personally, I usually only check comments, I donāt check every ID I receive.
Do others?
As far as I have seen, notifications in the sense you mean it only apply to the website. Sure, I could scroll my entire corpus of observations in the app and see if any have turned pink; but thatās hardly time effective to do every day. If the observer you are interacting with only uses the app, and you are interacting with one of their older observations, they may never scroll far enough down to know about it.
excluding the case of mentions, i believe identifications with comments and identifications without comments get treated the same for the purposes of generating notifications.
This is what ācomments within IDā notifications look like on Android and iOS when confirming ID notifications are turned off (no mention of a comment within the ID). My ID was already Euthamia graminifolia on this observation.
Thankyou.
Your screenshots answer my query and conversation off forum ( fyi @malcolmstorey )
Itās problematic, I think most identifiers donāt realise this (?)
I hope this can be fixed in notifications soon!
I hope more identifiers can be made aware that their comments may not be notified to the observer clearly also. I imagine it is a cause of frustration for some. ā¦.or at least, this was problematic for me for a long time, as I was not checking every IDā¦only notifications of comments.
I still mainly focus on comment notifications.
Do other people check every ID they get on their own observations to see if there are comments?
Or do you just check IDs which indicate it has been placed to a higher taxon so there might be an issue? Or do people just check notifications of standalone comments?
I check all notifications
I check notifications of comments
I check IDs where there is a higher taxon shown, indicating there may be a disagreement and connected comment
0voters
And as identifiers, which is correct ?
you were unaware comments inside notifications are not clearly denoted
you tag observer in to make sure they see
you write comment separately to make sure they see
you donāt see why this matters because, as an observer you check all your IDs regardless and presume everyone else does too!
I understand. My point was, notes within IDs do generate notifications that can behave differently than IDs without notes depending on your settings. And I agree, the wording of the notifications isnāt very clear. Staff reportedly is working on completely redoing notifications on iNat, but these things take time.
I see, sorry, I did miss the nuance in exactly what you saying.
Neverthelessā¦ it still doesnāt cover the central issue for me here even if I do now understand you correctlyā¦ as the most essential comments tend to come from disagreeing IDs, not confirming IDs (?)ā¦ and the notification difference being connected to confirming ID preference makes it anyway beyond subtle hahaā¦butā¦. interesting to know!
Not to be cynical or critical ( I think thereās been far too much of that directed at staff of late in the forums following the AI google affair )ā¦.but the notifications thread was last updated 5 years agoā¦soā¦ I donāt have much hope of this changing any time soon tbh.
Iām just curious how much people are aware of it at present and how people navigate the existing limitationsā¦. all too often I see high level identifiers adding comments inside IDs - often with extensive detail, which I fear is simply overlooked by most observers. But maybe Iām wrong in how the average observer responds to a notification.
Please vote in the polls above if you read this anyone!
Would be nice!
But feature requests connected to notifications are currently closed I believeā¦
This is also probably already logged in some form on the notifications thread.
See :
If you comment, and @mention, you generate TWO notifications, which makes iNat more tedious for busy taxon specialists. While we still lack adequate tools to manage notifications. I read all of mine - but we cannot choose to Mark as Read or keep Unread - so some slip thru the cracks even with good intentions.
I tend to assume that observers see comments in an ID, given that most of them agree with my ID. I donāt know of any way to agree with an ID without seeing comments ā unless there is some method I am missing, either you are opening the observation or using the agree button on the dashboard notification, which will show comments along with the ID.
Which app are you using? The android app has an āactivityā page which is not identical to the website notifications, but it shows comments and IDs for your observations and observations you are subscribed to.
On the other side of things, Iām more likely to notice a comment if itās part of an ID - Iāve only recently realised that if someone leaves a comment and then adds an ID, Iāll only see the ID as the two are combined on my dashboard (I donāt use the notifications list at the top right on the website - found it didnāt do what I wanted). So if I suspect there may be a comment, Iāll āshow moreā; otherwise I may just miss it. The idea of showing only the most recent activity is neither intuitive nor helpful, in my opinion.
A related issue: the āsearch my commentsā query ( https://www.inaturalist.org/comments?mine=true ) will not turn up comments left in IDs. Sometimes I go looking for something Iāve said (say, if Iāve told users about an ID feature that turns out to be unreliable and I want to correct that) only to realize that I canāt find it if I havenāt added it as a standalone comment. And thatās a bummer :(
Is this to do with what @swampster is talking about?
Any comments inside or outside of IDs show on my dash as individual notifications afaik.
But I have confirming IDs turned off and donāt really use the dash tbf.
Interesting. As someone with a high number of obs and IDs it surprises me you use the dash over the dropdown notifications. When you have 70 or so notifications, surely scrolling through the dash takes ages in comparison to a quick glance at the dropdown?
Yes, to do with the difference in comments within IDs versus separately. I donāt have confirming notifications turned off because I like to see whatās being confirmed and by whom - itās an easy way to get a feel for who knows what. The problem is that the dash only shows the latest āthingā, whether comment or ID - it might show up on multiple pages if (a) I have to scroll through multiple pages and (b) more was happening, but each time it shows the same thing. So if there have been multiple comments, IDs, or a combination, only the last one will show. Maybe using the notifications list would help with that, but then itās just an extra thing to scroll through.
@ mentions are an exception, in that theyāll show up as a separate thing, but even then Iāve been caught by people who put my name on one line (maybe with a āthanksā) and then more on a second line, because the dash only shows the line with my nameā¦ Itās a learning process!
I havenāt tried it for a while so I may not be remembering exactly, but my memory is that it didnāt provide as much information as I wanted, so I was needing to look at lots of individual observations to check what was going on, whereas the dash provides more information so I donāt need to click through to as many. I guess another aspect is that I also follow various taxa and places, so Iām already looking through them on the dash anyway. Yes, it takes time - but I donāt think I found the dropdown much better, if at all.
