If you fave an observation or add a comment or ID to it, iNaturalist automatically marks you as “following” the observation, meaning you’ll get notified if IDs or comments are added to it. You can unfollow an observation by clicking the “Follow” button in the upper right-hand corner of the observation:
Understood, copying from above:
(sigh) sorry I missed that. yeah, we’re not accepting feature requests for notifications. we’ve started the notifications revamp, but it’s currently on the backburner as we get things ready for CNC and the northern hemisphere spring bump. It’s also really complicated in both design and programming aspects, so the full revamp likely won’t be out until later this year.
Totally agree that there are times it doesn’t feel worth it to add an ID, but if you want to pre-empt the notifications, you can just go ahead and add one anyway.
Thanks @jwidness, I hadn’t thought of that, but my personal choice would be to use that very sparingly. It’s a non-ideal work-around, I would worry about spamming the people who haven’t opted out of the confirming ID notification. (I’ve met even some power users who weren’t aware of this feature.) Maybe others don’t consider that iNat spam, but I think I do…
Goodness, how unfortunate.
That is very considerate, thank you!
I would go further to say that it’s the reason many identifiers add those extra confirming IDs. They want to be notified of any non agreeing IDs or comments, and not the confirming ones (that are same as they put themselves). They don’t create alerts for those that have that setting activated, and for those that don’t have that setting, if extra alerts bother them then they will at some stage learn about and set it, and so the extra alerts you create for them only brings that eventuality forward by a couple IDs, so it’s not really an inconvenience at all!
They do create alerts for those that have that setting activated but whose identifications are less-refined. I have quit making any identifications on Unknowns and State of Matter Life for that reason.
I misinterpreted what you were saying at first…
when putting high level IDs to unknowns you could
The second option would allow you the benefit of seeing what it eventually ends up as, and if you see those enough times then it might be remembered at some future unknowns session and you can go finer from the outset.
It would be cool if we could temporarily change a setting so that ALL IDs aren’t auto-followed, and then be able to change the setting back after the “unknowns session”. @tiwane has indicated they aren’t taking new requests for the alerts system though… but maybe this would be an easy option to add seeing as it is very similar to the current “Notify me about confirming identifications” option.
Yeah I don’t think faving should automatically follow either https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/separate-faving-from-following/5110
There’s a lot of content on the forum now that it’s over a year old!
Don’tremember if I wrote it before, but it should be made variable, e.g. you should be able to choose to not recieve agree ids on your own observations or on those that you ided. Personally I want to see agreements on mine obs and not really care about agreements on other’s obs.
This would not solve the problem for me because (1) no matter how many finer identifications precede an actual disagreeing ID (as opposed to a refinement), I still want to see the disagreeing ID, and (2) I can’t unfollow my own observations (I just make fewer observations now). So, to me, multiple choices about the notifications that each person could choose among would be preferable.
Back to “disagreeing” subspecies IDs again for a second (sorry), I think the lumping suggestion would also be useful here. I say this partly because I’m currently feeling very irritated by one particular user who added 80 subspecies IDs before I could mute him – all on RG observations with tons of IDs already, and for a subspecies that’s not identifiable by external phenotype, only genetics and morphometrics. Anyway, I would be soooo thrilled if instead of 80 spammy notifications, I just got one that said something like “username123 added 80 notifications of Abc def subspecies ghi”.
Yeah I’ve got people doing this too (perhaps the same ones) and I find it irritating also.
Amazing, looking forward to these updates @tiwane. Is there any plan to make some of these notifications (and a better dashboard) available on the mobile app as well? Mobile apps are a natural channel for notifications, and in my experience many occasional users who rarely use the website completely miss comments or other types of notifications other than IDs.
If there’s a separate place to discuss priorities for the app, I’m happy to chime in there.
Also, related to this a notification that tells me when I reported a new species in my life list that reaches RG status would be amazing. Adding some optional statistics to the notification itself would be fantastic (but I’m aware this would be challenging to implement), e.g. [taxon name] is your Nth species and your Mth species of [class the species it belongs too]. It’s been observed Q times in [relevant geographical context]). There’s ample evidence in the social computing literature that self-directed notifications like this one contribute to new user retention.
Yes! I never knew that the website existed, and when I found out, I found mentions of me that I had missed from a year ago. :-0
I feel you on this one @jwidness. I would pay good money to never get another subspecies ID notification again (that was in agreement at the species level). Until this thread, I had not thought of muting some of these subspecies enthusiasts and now will start doing that.