some more ideas. i’m not sure if they all belong here, but they belong somewhere:
- i think it would be nice to be able to follow and be notified on #tags. as an example of a use case, maybe i do a lot of IDs, but I don’t want random people to @mention me (and maybe they don’t really know who to @mention). i can ask them to use something like #ineedidhelp instead, and then i maybe i can follow taxon + #ineedidhelp or place + #ineedidhelp, and that might be a little more streamlined process. or maybe if i see interesting things, i can put #coolobservation in the comment, and others who follow that #tag can be notified of the cool observation.
- in discussion boards that use Jive as their platform, they allow you to organize discussions into “steams”, which are just collections of individual threads, topics, tags, people, etc. you can choose one of these “streams” to be your core stream, and then the others help you view stuff in different ways. the core stream will show a little counter of new activity in the upper right corner, though each stream (in a pane on the left side of screen) will also have its own counter. e-mail notifications can be turned on or off for each stream. at a thread level, you can click a button and choose to have it be followed in one ore more (or none) of your streams. i think it might be nice to organize things in a similar way in iNaturalist. each “stream” could be collections of individual observations, taxa, projects, messages, flags, places, people, #tags, and/or maybe you could define a query like only bird observations in Texas that need ID. and the other nice thing would be that you could also use a stream as sort of a way to collect interesting observations without needing to resort to a project. so for example, if i have some observations that i need to key out later, instead of throwing them into a project, i can put them into a stream.
- i think it might be nice to be able to share some of my “streams” with the public, and also provide a way to show a status/priority on these. so for example, maybe I call one of these streams “Texas birds to be IDed”, and maybe i can assign a status on this stream that says something like “actively monitoring it”. maybe that causes a little green dot to show up next to my icon, and if someone highlights over the green dot, they can see that i’m actively working on Texas bird IDs. or if i change the status to “on the back burner”, then maybe a yellow dot shows up and lets people know that i’m not looking at that right now. maybe i’m super busy, i set my status to “busy on other stuff. not working on this.” that shows a red dot, and lets people know i’m not working on Texas bird IDs a that moment. maybe the statuses can even drive whether i receive e-mails, etc. that way, i can throttle stuff up and down as conditions change.