In the old taxon search area, we can find inactive taxa:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/search?is_active=any&q=corycium&utf8=✓
In the newer header search area, there’s no way to search for inactive taxa:
https://www.inaturalist.org/search?q=corycium&source[]=taxa
One of many little things that would help improve taxonomic curation on iNat.
you can still do that here https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/search with the ’ Show active and inactive taxa’ toggle. Inactive taxa are pretty niche and confuse a lot of new users so I’m not sure I’m in favor of putting them in the main taxon search nav - but curious what others think
Yeah it’s definitely an obscure thing but seems like a no brainer to at least display this for curators on the new search. Shouldn’t the old style taxon search be deprecated at some point?
I think it is very useful, and sometimes essential, to see inactive taxa. We dont need it visible or an on-screen option. So long as the old taxon search area remains, that is OK. However, if the the taxon page is going to be deprecated, then we need a replacement.
I just ran into this. Typing any taxon in the search bar brings up suggestions for what the current equivalent taxon is. Searching for eudicots shows angiospermae. Searching for a taxon that’s been dropped, doesn’t do this, however. E.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/search?q=selaginella+emmeliana does not lead to https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/426645-Selaginella-emmeliana. @loarie’s response above helps, but I would not have known how to find https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/search without this forum.
So perhaps it’s a good idea to have the standard search field on the main page return anything that the inaturalist taxonomy ever knew about. Even if it’s niche.
Maybe you should vote for it. :)
B-but… my precious votes!
To me the ideal solution would be to have a single portal for taxon searches, and have an active/inactive filter that is only available to curators as part of that. I do occasionally have a need to research inactive taxa for past taxon changes, dealing with new ungrafted taxa, etc.
@bouteloua so would you want the inactive taxa to appear on the Taxa search results page for curators, much like this does?
Yeah, I think there should be the same type of link on the newer search as there is on the older /taxa/search page: one that says “Show active and inactive taxa”. Then it switches to “Only show active taxa” so you can go between the options.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/search?is_active=any&q=corycium&utf8=✓
@schoenitz you might find you have enough votes now ;)
I’ll happily vote for this!
Any chance on this one? It seems unreasonable to me that curators need to use a separate taxon search to find inactive taxa when there’s already a convenient taxon search available in the header. It can also be confusing for new curators who aren’t familiar with the antiquated system for searching taxa. Thanks!
Inactive would definitely help, though sometimes I would still have to use the old search because there are just too many fuzzy matches and you can’t force exact matches in the header search.
Adding my vote of support to this, I could not find a way to search this way in the new search and was unable to remember the address for the older search.
Added it to my weekly report.
Would this be the appropriate place to ask for the “Show Active and Inactive Taxa” button to be sticky? Or should that be a separate request? I suppose if this feature was implemented then it would be an unnecessary request, but if I’m going to the Taxon Search page I always want to search for active and inactive taxa. Moreover, searching the external provider reverts back to only active taxa after the search which is pretty annoying if you want to search for another taxon. (Although you can open each search in a new tab.)
I think edits to the existing functionality would be a new request.
Would you want the proposed “show active and inactive button” on the main/header search to also be sticky? Or no?
I’d probably want it to be sticky. I don’t ever use it to intentionally exclude inactive taxa.
For some reason it now (past several months at least) takes 15-30 seconds to load the /taxa page, adding to the frustration of using that as the location to search for inactive taxa.
