Notifications on iNaturalist - Please Share Your Ideas!

Thanks! Yeah, I was talking about IDs that are only in observations that aren’t mine.

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That was already proposed, to split own and others’ notifications.

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Oh ok, disregard my second comment then. Sorry, I didn’t have time to go read what other people said yesterday because I was fishing.

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That’s cool, I hope this feature will be added!

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Hey all,

I just want to thank everyone for the ideas and suggestions. We’re past the point of idea gathering, however, so I’m going to close this discussion soon. The hard work of implementation, making sure the design works with the code and vice versa, lays ahead. My goal is to make a follow-up post this week with some basic descriptions of what to expect, although things will change as we work through it.

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OK. As I said, below are some basics about the upcoming notifications revamp - these apply mainly to the header notifications. I don’t want to go into details because things may (and probably will) change as we work through implementation and testing, so this list is not comprehensive.

  • “Conversations” - comments, ID remarks, and @ mentions - will be prioritized, since those are what we and our test users said were what they wanted to be notified about the most. And yes, you should only get one notification for a mention in a comment. :-)

  • You’ll be notified when your observation or an observation you are following has its community ID or data quality grade altered by the action of another user (ID, Data Quality Assessment vote, etc). You’ll also be notified about annotations or observation fields added by other users, and if an observation of yours is faved.

  • One notification per resource, even with activity from multiple users. So if 4 people comment on your observation, you’ll only get one notification for it.

  • More fine-grained control: don’t want to be notified about annotations, observation fields, or subspecies IDs? You’ll have options to turn off notifications like that.

  • An “All notifications” page that will keep your notifications for a certain period of time, in case you missed that mention or comment. It won’t be lost in the bowels of your dashboard’s back pages.

  • The ability to mark a notification as read.

That’s about it for now, I’ll leave this topic open for another day or two if you have comments or questions, but I won’t be able to say much more at this time. Thanks for all of your ideas and your contributions to iNat.

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And also unread?

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Yup, both.

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Looking forward to “all notifications” page! Hope period of time it remains present for is a good length… It would be really useful to come back to and find comments / conversations…or even save them so they don’t leave the notifications page.

Could be useful to be able to sort by date, or sort by kind to be able to split comments from ID changes for clarity maybe also ( depending on design ).

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Are the header notifications the ones under the “speech bubble” icon in the top right corner of the page ribbon, or the ones in the tab labeled “Home” on the main page after you log in?

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They’re the ones under the “speech bubble”.

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Thank you. I was confused because neither area really seemed to be a header.

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It doesn’t seem to be one notification per resource for me, if we are talking about the “speech bubble” notification area as @jwidness stated . It does seem to be only one in the Home tab.
E.g. This is what I saw just this morning, where someone is filling out observation fields on an observation I am following:

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the changes haven’t been implemented yet. looking forward to it!

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Ah, that explains it!

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Also, I didn’t blur or redact anything in the screen shot, because no one was doing anything wrong, so it wasn’t “calling somebody out”. Is that ok, or should I still edit it?

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No worries! It’s really only an issue when people are doing something “wrong”. Thanks for thinking of it.

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@star3 I wish it was already live on the site! No, now is the hard part of coding these changes to functionality and making sure the proposed user interface changes (the way notifications are displayed, etc) work with them, so that will take a while, alas.

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Of course! Sorry for misinterpreting the timeline on this announcement.

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No worries!

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