Thank you for bringing this topic up. I have often wondered on the best approach for commenting when identifying.
If I am adding an ID that disagrees with the observer’s ID, and want to explain why, I have two different approaches.
If the observer’s ID is the only one, I check if they are still active (not gonna waste my time commenting for long-gone users) and make a comment that is separate from my ID, on the theory that they will get two notifications, not one, and are more likely to notice (maybe that’s overly optimistic, or just plain wrong.)
If other identifiers have already made disagreeing IDs, and I still want to comment, I do it within my ID, because I don’t want the other identifiers to get an extra notification for just a comment, knowing that many of them already get vast numbers of notifications.
There is a huge blind spot in my understanding of how iNat works, in that I have never used the app, so I have generally no idea of how it differs from the website. I tend to forget that there are entirely different ways of interacting with iNaturalist, until it comes up in topics like this.
Should I download and play with the app, for better insight into the experience of other users? Maybe, in the oncoming winter, when the flood of new plant observations slows to a trickle of dead leaves and bare twigs…
I use the dashboard. Click Show More. And then open in a new tab if I need to. When I no longer want to see the conversation on That Obs, I unsubscribe or unfollow.
But as mentioned above, the comment by @swampster did not solve it in my view.
The bug you logged also doesn’t grapple with it exactly, as I think the most important lost comments at present come from within disagreeing IDs, not confirming IDs. As I understand it, users are not notified of these at all still.
That said, your screenshots did answer my original question to some extent… but I’m realising there is a lot more nuance to it even than I realised. In both how the existing interface works depending on different settings…. and how both observers and identifiers use it.
As such, I wish to continue to hear how people are using the existing system if that’s ok?
I can edit the original post if you prefer, but I would prefer if it wasn’t marked as solved…
I’m interested in how people are responding to the poll particularly - it’s not what I imagined.
And in hearing how other people grapple with the existing system, as @danly and @dianastuder have just described.