Notifications on iNaturalist - Please Share Your Ideas!

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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Make sure notifications with substance, such as comments posted, persist somewhere after they are clicked. That way you can go back to them later. It’d be good to have that for anything on the main site, like mentions too, just not for things we have on the forum such as likes. A list or page with all observations that you are following would be good.

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You can find this on your dashboard under Subscriptions and then Observations

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I agree. I would also like to see complete comments (whether attached to an ID or not) included right in the notifications page, so that there is no need to open the observation to see them unless more context is desired.

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And for those of us who choose not to get notifications of confirming IDs, I would like my ID displayed on the notifications page as well, so that I don’t have to open the observation for no reason. As here:

I received the notification despite it being in complete agreement with my own identification, but I had to open it to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake. If my ID had been included on the notifications page I wouldn’t have had to open it.

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Hey folks, just an update: now that things have finally calmed down after CNC and the “spring bump”, we’ve started to turn our attention to the notifications revamp. Because this will be a reworking of a major part of iNaturalist, it will take quite some time so please be patient, and thank you for all of your feedback!

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Thank you for letting us know.

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The above referred to comments, but I want to add that this would make it easier on people who opt-out of confirming IDs, but still get non-disagreeing identifications below the level of their ID, by helping them evaluate whether they want to open the observation to view it. (An example would be a plant that I am comfortable identifying only to genus level, but others ID to species and/or subspecies.) Having one’s own ID on the notification itself would streamline the process of going through notifications by making it unnecessary to go in and out of the observations themselves to make sure there’s no real disagreement.

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