Notifications on iNaturalist - Please Share Your Ideas!

General
#180

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.

18 Likes
Have system add a comment when photos change
Changes to the Agree button/functionality and addition of Markdown in comments and ID Remarks
#181

And also unread?

6 Likes
#182

Yup, both.

6 Likes
#185

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 ).

2 Likes
#186

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?

2 Likes
#187

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

3 Likes
#188

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

2 Likes
#189

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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1 Like
#190

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

5 Likes
#191

Ah, that explains it!

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#192

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?

2 Likes
#193

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

2 Likes
#194

@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.

3 Likes
#195

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

1 Like
#196

No worries!

1 Like
#197

Oof this might be too late but maybe it’s been suggested already or it’s planned. I would appreciate a notification something like

  • user identified 7 observations that you previously identified
    or
  • user agreed to your identification on 7 observations

And then clicking on the notification would show me a list of the observations affected.
I don’t have agreeing ID notifications turned off because I appreciate seeing when people are agreeing to my IDs (whether that’s the observer immediately agreeing or another identifier going through) but because of that I never click on ID notifications (I look at all comment and mention notifs) which means I miss some ID notifications that I should probably review. Sometimes another user will review a taxon I’ve reviewed before and I’ll get hundreds of notifications in a day. I’d like to know that that happened but I don’t want to miss any other activity that happened among it.

3 Likes
#198

Re: the DQA, is that on votes only, or other aspects?

eg if an observation is missing some aspect needed for RG (like date, location, or photo/audio), but there were no DQA votes re: evidence, or inaccurate location or date since the observation can’t get to RG anyway, and then observer went back later and added those missing bits of info

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2 Likes
Have system add a comment when photos change
#199

Wow, this will be an extremely useful notification system. Kudos to the coders who are working on this.

2 Likes
#200

I’m pretty sure this won’t be part of it, as notifications will revolve around resources (observations, journal posts) and not the activity of another user. But you should be able to filter through all of your recent notifications on the All Notifications screen.

It should be any change in the observation’s quality label, so not just DQA votes.

OK, I’m going to close this topic. Thanks for all of your input!

6 Likes
Have system add a comment when photos change
#201