Platform: Web
Browser, if a website issue: Firefox
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Description of problem: I’m receiving a notice for something that is irrelevant to me, from someone I’ve never interacted with, and I don’t have a means of clearing it or otherwise removing it from my feed. If it doesn’t apply to me, I really don’t care about a taxon change in the slightest. Is there a setting somewhere that I missed to disable this from occurring?
Welcome to the forum! I’m not sure exactly what you are describing but double check this.
You usually get these notices if you are ‘following’ that specific taxon, a higher group it belongs to, or a specific place where that taxon lives. You can check and manage your active subscriptions on your dashboard settings to stop these alerts.
Alternatively, you can click into the notification and look for a ‘Mute’ or ‘Unfollow’ option to clear it from your feed
Not following any places or taxa nor the curator making this swap, have zero affected observations or identifications, received the same notification.
You get notified for these if you follow any affected observations. So if you added a comment or different (likely higher level) ID to one of these observations you will get that notification. e.g. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/view-affected-content-after-taxon-change/29776/6?u=thomaseverest
The View affected IDs button only applies to your IDs, which wasn’t exactly the intent of my feature request but I never got around to submitting another.
You have an observation of Colonus hesperus that was not indexed properly. Genus Colonus was moved from Gophonini to Gophoini before the taxon change shown above was committed (curators cannot inactivate taxa with children under them). In many cases, especially recently, this can result in indexing errors. You received a notification because your observation was still indexing under Gophonini (this was tested by searching for your observations under the now inactive Gophonini), but there were no IDs of Gophonini to actually be changed in that observation, so it shows as you having no relevant content. I forced your observation to reindex by adding/deleting an ID, so it now shows under Gophoini. This is generally a quick fix for issues like this.
There are still 27,400 observations of Gophonini not indexed properly. I’m not sure what the fix to something so wide-scale would be. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/712043-Gophonini
See my comment above. You have an observation of Colonus that is not indexed correctly.
Large changes like that take a while for everything to finish reindexing.
If you move a bunch of taxa all at once and then immediately swap the taxon they were parented to, the indexing will freeze because the re-parented taxa did not have time to finish reindexing. The number of observations under Gophonini is not going down because that was done here. The swap will probably have to be done again to force another reindex to fit it.
I’m describing a notice I received in my feed that I believe I shouldn’t have. Is that not clear from the written description and attached images of that notice?
With regards to how I received it: I’m following neither the curator, nor the taxon. I have never followed a thing on this site. Muting the person responsible did nothing (I attempted that before creating this post.)
I get this all the time. I think for me it’s because there’s a place I manage via a project and I’ve uploaded a long checklist of expected species here, so I get notifications based on that regardless of whether I have any observations or identifications of the species in question.
You don’t have to follow the taxon to get a notification like this. If the name was used to either identify one of your observations or you used it to identity someone else’s observation, you get the notice. It’s basically saying that a name that applies to some of your content or that you’ve used before is changing and so you might want to check the affected observations. I think you may be able to turn off at least some of these taxon-related notifications in your account preferences if you don’t want to see them.
Sure, that is clear, but I personally wasn’t sure as to the cause of the notice, as you had not specified whether you had any prior connection to the observations in question on iNat. When I said “following” I also meant the term in a broader sense: in regards to any observations you may have used to identify or has been identified for you. Therefore in some related case a taxon that you’ve used before is changing so you are getting notified so you know what is going on. As others have said, give it some time to completely finish.
I see a lot of folks in here repeating the same few statements (you have an observation impacted, are managing or curating, followed someone). I have to admit some frustration, given that I covered these statements explicitly in my original write-up. Let me state this unequivocally, again:
I do not follow anyone on this site.
I do not follow any taxa on this site.
I do not follow anything on this site, full stop (as shown in the screenshot provided.)
I do not curate any projects.
I do not manage anything here.
I have never interacted with the person responsible for this notification popping up.
I do not have any observations impacted by this change, according to the site itself (as shown in the screenshot I provided.)
I have only ever identified my own observations, and if they’re not impacted, then it follows that I have not used an identification impacted by this event before.
I believe this is a bug, and it should be looked into.
Did you read this? If so, why did you not address it explicitly? Please understand we are trying to help you; everyone here is taking time out of their own busy lives to assist you personally. No need to express blunt frustration at us. Respectfully, please be kind.
If everything users have mentioned doesn’t solve your problem, wait a few days for the taxonomic situation to be resolved, as so often happens while waiting for staff to address this specific situation.
Also, if you are suggesting the simple fact that you got the message is a bug. That is not correct. Your observation of Colonus hesperus is the cause, as making that observation automatically makes you get the notification.
This is not correct as I said above. Did you ever click the button shown in your screenshot that says “Change your matching observations to this taxon”? First of all it shows you do have relevant observations and second doing that fixed the problem for myself.
When this taxon change appeared in my dashboard, the only button available at least for me, was not this one. Other than “ve detalles”, my only option was and is the “ver tus IDs afectados”, which did and still does return an empty set, no results, however my one Colonus observation now does appear in Gophoini for what that is worth.
I have taken no other action, nor was any other action available to me at any time.
I assume it produced empty results because as @rynxs explained, some observations were not indexed properly, at least initially, or perhaps it was just a lengthy process, as @thomaseverest said. Both make sense to me.
Obviously I am unfamiliar with these processes but I did want to note that this taxon change looked and felt wholly different than others for which I have been notified and so I too was confused as to why I was notified.
That’s just an explainer for the “Following” tab. Just click on “Got it!” you won’t see it again.
Interesting, clearly the case is different for OP.
That’s good! Are you still getting the notification, etc. or is it all right now?
It could be because of the weird processing of the affected taxon. I’ll ask Caleb, a fellow spider identifier, who initiated the flag if he could address this question better.
Hi @gnarflethegarthok . I think this would be your impacted observation.
It appears to have been fixed by the above user so maybe that is why nothing happens; there is no longer a need. (bolding mine)
I was confused, too, especially since taxon changes are far out of my skillset.
Be well.
