I recently (past ~24 hours) started getting overwhelmed with a flood of notifications about people changing information about soil conditions, soil moisture, light environment, etc.
I don’t know how to turn these off. There are so many of them and they are junking up my notifications to where I am having a hard time fiding the notifications about people adding comments and different ID’s, which I want to be notified about.
Is there a way to disable these, and I am just not finding it? I tried going into the Account Settings on the website but I don’t see an option for it. Or do we need to make a feature request for this?
The change is bad enough to make the site borderline unusable. I have made hundreds of identifications on this site and I cannot keep up with the number of notifications if I get a flood of notifications about this small stuff.
I would also like to know. It seems to be part of a college course. The students have probably been instructed to fill out fields for habitat conditions in exchange for grades.
I don’t have any issue with the users doing it; quite to the contrary, I think it’s great.
I just don’t want to be notified of these updates, because they’re overwhelming.
Is there no way to disable these currently? If so please let me know and I can submit a feature request if there is not one already. I just would like to restore the previous notification functionality (i.e. being able to view my notifications without them being so cluttered.)
If it’s a small number of users adding the fields, you might try muting them (Account Settings → Muted Users). I’m pretty sure this will stop you being notified by their activity.
I know notifications are being redone, hopefully how they are displayed in the future this sort of thing will be less obnoxious (for instance maybe a drop down window that says ‘a user updated field Soil Conditions for 64 observations’ or something.)… I’ve had this sort of thing happen too, and I agree it isn’t great. Though I haven’t seen it this time, i must not have ID’ed those observations.
I’d rather not mute them because I’ve been having some really productive conversations with users about their records, and I don’t want to mute any comments or ID changes.
The conversations about plant ID have actually been my favorite aspect of iNaturalist! They’ve been really delightful, and I’ve been learning an incredible amount!
I’m also not sure muting would help because it’s coming from a large number of different users.
I think for now I’ll just put up with this, but I hope the team can keep this in the back of their minds! Hopefully this is just a temporary thing, perhaps associated with a class assignment, and it will not be a long-term problem!
@cazort’s post happened during a notifications revamp staff meeting, so it was very topical. Definitely something that will be at least reduced or mitigated, but we’re still working through the revamp.