There’s an iNaturalist plugin for Lightroom??? What have I been missing!? I think you’ve just changed my life 
… and I haven’t even had my first cup of coffee yet.
OK, but when I’ve stopped bouncing around with enthusiasm, this does make me think that a special section for extensions and such like would also be amazing to find bits and pieces that might be useful for our individual workflows.
For additional context, we’re getting between 2 and 6 such topics per day.
Ah, sorry. That was just a random choice - I could just as easily have chosen some other shape. I did actually read your thread and never considered muting it. Your topic title was “Nature question I cannot answer, can you?”, which wouldn’t have lead me to assume it must be another “show me your [whatever] things” thread.
No topic is ever intrinsically mute-worthy. It’s all simply matter of personal preferences. I’ve very likely missed out on a lot of interesting replies by muting some of those generic topics with hundreds of posts, but I’m afraid I sometimes just lack the patience to read through everything in the hope of finding them.
I appreciate this, thank you.
We are all allowed personal preference and different patience levels and amounts of time and the right to prioritize our time as we deem fit, so thank goodness for the ability to set topics to normal or untrack or mute or whatever we need to best fit our time and patience and preference and priority.
@tiwane, I didn’t mean to suggest I wondered why iNat credentials were not required to log in so much as why it was not required to fill in the iNat username on the forum profile.
I also wondered if requiring people to be iNat members to post on the Forum might do away with some of the posts by people confused by the two who post looking for identification here first, only to be told they need to put their photos there. I think perhaps they think they have found “the” iNat when they come to the forum and perhaps a pop-up box on that field might be useful.
But I appreciate your good point, that people might have questions about iNaturalist before joining.
Yes - and my post made exactly the same point. But there’s a big difference between a commercial interest explicitly advertising their products here and someone with no vested interests merely recommending a product in response to requests for advice. To be more precise: we don’t want to encourage unsolicted advertising of commercial products by people with vested interests, however useful those products may be to community members.
But that would just be spam, which I think is starting to stray beyond the topic of this thread.
It seems more productive to deal with the actual issues we’re faced with right now, than hypothetical scenarios that may never happen. The main focus of the topic seems to be fellow community members announcing their non-commercial, iNaturalist-based apps on the forum. Now, I would say that if an app author even so much as tentatively asks for voluntary donations of the buy-me-a-coffee kind, that could be seen as unsolicited advertising, and therefore potentially unacceptable (depending on the moderators’ discretion, I suppose).
I don’t deny that spam can often be hard to detect - but responding to requests for recommendations is clearly neither spam, nor unsolicted advertising. Is there any concrete evidence that forum members have been unjustly penalised as a result of this?
i don’t know for sure if we’ve had a fake discussion between two fake actors in the past on this forum, but we’ve definitely had random folks hijacking existing topics to “recommend” products, and we’ve definitely had random folks (non-regular forum members) starting new topics asking for others’ opinions of commercial or commercial-adjacent products. these all exist in the same spectrum, with obvious ads on one end and fake discussions between multiple fake actors on the other end.
they haven’t yet, as far as i know, but that’s one possible destination this discussion leads to. if you ban all advertising of commercial products, how do you differentiate between the business owner advertising the product and a random “forum member” asking for opinions about the same product? the folks who are shameless enough to advertise on a forum are going to be the same folks who will switch to the latter tactic, as needed.
that’s why i think other criteria are going to be easier to enforce than just whether something has a revenue stream. maybe whether something is commercial can factor into the final decision with other factors, but i’m not sure whether commercial should be something that alone should cause a post or thread to be flagged / hidden.
then perhaps a polite reminder to - make an iNat profile, make a few obs, try an ID … before they settle in to tell us how to do it.
One topic, or 3 comments - then you need an active profile to continue ?
This is becoming perhaps long overdue.
Maybe “Tech Talk” to mirror “Nature Talk”?
For apps / scripts / games / collabs one might have to share / seek feedback on. It could perhaps also be a place for tech recommendations, to include cameras, lenses, widgets. etc.
Noted.
Hi! I wanted to ask for guidance before starting a new topic.
I recently created iMineralogist, an independent app for rocks, minerals, fossils, and field observations. Part of the idea came from older forum threads where people were asking whether something like “iNaturalist for minerals” existed, but those threads are now closed.
Would it be appropriate to start a new thread in Nature Talk to share the project, ask for specific feedback from the community, and invite interested people to join the Android beta testing?
I want to make sure this would be welcome here and framed in the right way.
Thank you
I re-opened https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-there-an-inaturalist-for-rocks/12638/, maybe add it there so it’s findable in that topic? I think it’s fine to ask for beta feedback, but we wouldn’t want to host the discussion on this forum.
Wonderful! Thank you for your help.
Land Trust website journal: I came across some HTML code to post recent finds on a website. I made use of this on a land trust site as part of an ongoing journal entry where visitors can see the the last 20 observations made at the site. To look more closely, the link directs to iNaturalist. Love it
First off, I recently created a small browser extension with a bunch of useful features, and looking at these kinds of creations of other forum users is one of the most fun things on the forum to me. So I’m obviously biased.
Honestly, I never found these 3rd party games that fun or interesting, but I don’t see why they are a problem that needs fixing. Nobody is forced to use them and the only argument that comes to mind is that they use power of the API servers. But in the end the API is only requested if the app is actually used. If this is the case, then evidentially the app IS useful to somebody.
I think it is. Somebody created something specifically for and with iNat and they believe other iNat users could be interested in it. I don’t see any other place where this could be posted better than on the iNat forum.
In those cases, i.e. apps with payments/advertisement, I totally agree. However, I haven’t come across such an example yet. Most webapps are hosted ony some GitHub pages without ads or even on private servers that actually cost money rather than make money.
I think most people who post about their API creations started out by creating something useful for themselves and then
I don’t see a problem with either. If you think such a project is not worth recognition, then you don’t give recognition. I also see a lot of projects and think “this is kinda useless” but I still think it’s great somebody did it, if it is useful to them. And most importantly, I think we should not instantiate a committee that starts judging what is a cool project and what is not and should be taken down. This is quite literally the opposite of the idea openness that iNat associated with itself. (I’m of course not talking about harmful and exploitative apps that try to make money off of open data or similar. These must be restricted.)
A whole different question is how to handle it on the forum.
I think adding a new category for software and other creations would be an easy solution.
But I personally would not want to miss out on a super cool and useful app/extension.
Another thought:
While I would not outright ban 3rd party tools that don’t publish their source code, I think it would be fair to give back an open source project to the iNat community, when you are using open data from an open platform to power it!
This way one can also verify that an app does no weird stuff when authenticated to ones account for example.
“The Tool Box”!
Sorry, when terrible puns come to me I insist on sharing them. :D
Carry on…
This one, especially, feels more important. I feel like I am seeing brand new forum names attached to empty iNat profiles making requests that the community provide feedback, in some cases for what look like commercially developing products.
