Notifications on iNaturalist - Please Share Your Ideas!

I don’t even use it any more because the notification page that shows followed observers is pretty broken. So i still have people on the list but to be honest, i forgot it existed.

I understand–I wasn’t implying that those who do not follow back are less interested in community. I apologize if anything I wrote suggested that. I certainly assume that people have different approaches. I just like following back–I’m not an expert, so I don’t worry about having to deal with a lot of followers. But, usually for me, followers are in my geographical region, and I can identify common animals and plants in that case. I just want the option of knowing–I would hope such an ability would be something one could opt into or not. One could turn on the option in settings.

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I think it’s a great idea; I would like to know myself when someone is newly following me. It’s not currently possible, but I agree it should be added to the list when the notifications system is revamped (see first post of this topic).

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It would also be interesting if there could be a “reminder” feature, where you could mark an observation for review later. I find myself saying that I will review something and then completely forgetting to.

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I’ve thought the same thing, including observations of mine where someone has offered an ID that I want to research before accepting.

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If you haven’t yet, you might consider voting for the bookmark an observation feature request.

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I came here to request this, but seems several people already mentioned it. :) I’ve also had confirming notifications turned off for a long time…but at the same time,

So I’ve also been missing out on knowing who’s been most helpful in confirming my observations’ IDs. I know I can search for that information, e.g. IDers of my obs in the past month, but there’s something to be said for some sort of indication that these confirming IDs are happening, which would probably spur me to help ID their observations in return.

At the same time, I definitely don’t need 12 separate notifications of 12 people agreeing with my American robin observation :) so some sort of grouping of activity by user or observation would be necessary as indicated above.

Also, while I don’t (think) I care much about people agreeing with my IDs on other people’s observations, that may not be true across the board.

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yes, I think a grouping feature like with the notifications here in discourse… where ti says “5 others liked this post” or “5 replies to this topic”, and the ability to drill down to see each one if you want to

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Not sure if this would fall under Feature requests or Bug Reports, so I’m sticking it in the General category for now.

Something I’ve noticed on both the web and on the iOS app is that if someone includes a comment when suggesting an ID, the notification only says that they’ve suggested an ID. (In contrast, when someone submits an ID, then writes a comment, the notification list indicates both the ID and the comment.) It seems to me that if someone includes a comment (or question) along with their ID, the notification should indicate that.

What are your thoughts on this?

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I agree that it would be nice to see a notification for situations where an ID+comment are posted together. To avoid too much clutter on an observation page I’ve been using an @username if I’m making a comment with an identification so that the user will get a notification for the username reference. Doesn’t help with missing comments people leave for me but it’s a start, anyway.

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Yes, I agree, and others have brought this up, too. I almost never look to see if there’s a comment when someone seconds an ID of mine. I would prefer to get a separate notification.

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Thank you @bouteloua for moving my post into this thread. I did a brief search for other notifications-related topics but somehow missed this thread of wonderful ideas (apologies for repeating what others had already said).

I’m excited to see that the notifications system is getting upgraded. One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet in the notification wish-list is being able to control them by taxon. For example, I like to see notifications for confirming IDs for taxa I’m not as confident on, but I don’t need to see them for the umpteenth western sword fern I’ve identified.

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There is a Feature Request to allow not following your own observations (so you wouldn’t get notifications) on a case-by-case basis, if you’re interested in that: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/create-a-way-to-unfollow-ones-own-observations/103

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I was referring to identifications done for others, but it’s true, I don’t need those kinds of notifications for my own observations, either. Given how many observations some users have, I can definitely see why the ability to turn them off is appealing

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You can unfollow the observations of others on a case-by-case basis after making an identification.

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Very true, but also kind of onerous. My point is that it’d be nice to have the option in settings do that automatically for certain taxa.

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Sorry–that just didn’t sink in at first. I agree–that’s a good idea.

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if it’s not overly a burden on the servers, then I would appreciate that too. Any fine tuning of alerts received is going to make IDing easier and faster, allowing more to be ID’d. For an expert, I can see the benefit of turnign them off or ignoring them, but for us “learners”, we rely on the alerts to see our “learning opportunities”!

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My request for an explicit “f” = Follow and “u” = Unfollow in the Identify page could also be useful to
@tsn @charlie @bouteloua, etc (and 8 other new goodies)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-10-new-hot-keys-to-the-identify-page-to-speed-reviewers-efforts-improve-data-quality/3122

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some more thoughts…
4. in the dashboard, i’d also like a way to view things with small photos as they are now (like List view in Explore), or with larger photos by default (like Grid view in Explore).
5. i’d also like to be able to take certain actions on the observations from the dashboard. at a minimum, maybe add ways to agree, ID, comment, and review. but i think it would be really cool if there was an actions pane where i could pre-define some “action sets”. for example, you could pre-define a single action like agree, or something more complicated like ID as Plestiodon + comment “cannot be IDed to species without a better view of facial scales” + annotate as Adult + add to a Plestiodon project + reviewed. then the action sets could be accessed from an action menu on each observation, or an observation could be dragged over to an action set in the actions pane to apply the action(s) (or vice versa, with the action set dragged over to the observation). (if the “streams” idea, borrowed from Jive, was implemented, it would be cool to be able to have different action sets per stream.)
6. i’d like the “reviewed” indicator to show up on the dashboard and tell me whether i marked this before or after the last action to the observation. if i marked review before the last action, and i marked review again, then the observation would then show up as reviewed after the last action.
7. lastly, i think it would be cool if actions could be taken from the notification e-mails.

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