I notice these problems in going through “Unknown” and “State of matter Life” observations: A lot of users don’t seem to know not to keep changing their minds about whether their own observation is for the plant or the bug or the lizard in their photo. They post with one, identifiers go in that d…

[image] kelsonv: I’ll post the whole photo for the plant and crop it for the insect That’s a good idea. Sometimes identifiers will identify your plant photo as an insect anyway, so --to be sure your plant observation doesn’t go off track–adding a comment with a link to the insect observation …

[image] DianaStuder: Maybe if we were forced to choose a rough category when we put the obs up? I suggested that some weeks ago and it was very unpopular. Evidently a lot of power users want to upload their observations as “unknown” for speed reasons, and then go back and add ID when they hav…

I just figure that we shouldn’t worry about it too much. If it’s not obvious, I will identify what I think the subject to be, and point out where in the image it is, then leave it to the observer to either agree or to tell me something like “no, it’s the yellow thing on the left”. Not everything wi…

For 3. I add a description as to which one it is I am trying to identify. It is easy enough to do with duplicates.

A temporary Unknown with an automated reminder to add ID (specific or roughly) later?

[image] mtank: On setting a broad categorisation when you upload: Taking personal preference out of it, sometimes you can’t do better than “life” for your ID, ruling out a broad categorisation. There are probably other examples, but it’s reasonably common to not know whether something is a sea s…

The only way it would work is if the tagging requirement were after the draft mode and in that case things might just get stuck in draft mode. Again, it’s not “just” about speed. It literally broke the app to do this.

Maybe default to requiring a broad category at upload, but allow users to change that in their account-level settings. In practice, only power users would bother to dig into the settings to enable their large-upload workflows. The more-casual users who are actually causing extra work with unclassifi…

[image] jennformatics: default to requiring a broad category at upload, but allow users to change that in their account-level settings I think that’s a great idea, particularly since I don’t think the iNat admin team has committed to implementing a draft mode yet.

I already run into a lot of people who think the app is broken because of existing features that you can turn off. Making another one will just make it worse. The app is an incredibly useful tool and continuing to remove functionality and efficiency because some people don’t know how to use it is r…

Recurring Issues re Subject of Observation

General

jdmore July 4, 2019, 4:48am 24

There was this recent feature request that was ultimately rejected because of the potential complexity. Maybe someone can dream up a simpler means to the same end?

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Recurring Issues re Subject of Observation

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