I am sorry if this feature exists already: I did look around for it, and I tried searching the forums also.
I often submit observations in batches - whenever I upload and process images from my camera, for instance, or old observations from my harddisk whenever I find a bit of free time. So after one of these uploads, my dashboard tends to get very crowded.
Now, sometimes I have an observation where I request ID help by tagging one of the top-IDers of the taxon, or maybe I make a comment on someone else’s observation, which I help ID myself. This starts a conversation of sorts, and then if I want to check if there are replies to my comment, I need to search through several pages of dashboard news.
Is there a way to check directly for new comments? Like a filtered search? If not, then I think this would be a very useful feature to request. I know I am still a bit of a newbie, so there is a good chance I just did not discover the feature yet - if so, sorry to post the request.
I was about to post pretty much the identical question.
Besides the direct reasons to search for comments, I’m also hoping it could be used by teachers…I’m a science teacher, and I’m trying to give the world-language teachers a way to use iNat. If they could search for observations with comments from a specific country, then it would be more likely to find comments for students to translate. If that makes sense.
Definitely something we’re thinking about and that I hope we can implement.
I believe this is slightly different than the scenario that @mettehhh described in that you don’t want to search for comments made on your own observations, or as part of observations you were following, but just comments in general?
This is one of the most important features missing from the site.
As there is no way to add Tags to observations whilst in the ID window, the only tool that seems to be available is to add a comments with the tag you’re intending to assign to the observation.
If you cannot search for comments from IDers…there is no other way to search for non-taxon info from IDers, without going through each observation one by one.
This is such a small, but absolutely crucial, feature. Please add it.
I just came over looking to see if anyone had requested this yet! As a previous poster mentioned, when doing batch uploads one’s dashboard (and notifications panel) gets pretty cluttered pretty quickly with people simply confirming your species IDs. I’d love to have a spot where I can look for comments on observations, comments embedded in identification suggestions, and identification suggestions that differ from my own (I think I saw someone else mention that as a feature request) - that is, all the notifications that are NOT simply people agreeing with my own ID, since those don’t require any attention from me.
I would love if this feature could be added to the iPhone app!! I use the app about 98% of the time, and it displays only “so-and-so suggested an ID”, which doesn’t tell me if they’re disagreeing or if they’ve left an embedded comment, so the only way for me to check is to click on each and every notification to see the observation - tedious when there’s many, so I don’t bother, so I miss most comments and ID corrections.
This would be a nice thing to be able to search for. In the meantime, if you go to your account settings and uncheck “notify me about confirming identifications” it helps to cut down on all those agreeing ID notifications and only get the ones that disagree or have comments. I think you may miss agreeing IDs with embedded comments but I’m not entirely sure about that.
This is useful to know. But, in the absence of IDers being able to Tag or Categorise observations, comments are all they have…yet the content cannot be searched for some unknown reason.
Sounds like you’re trying to search for particular content within ID comments, but this feature request is just for showing observations that have any comments at all (in the context of reviewing one’s notifications).
This has affected how I use identification comments.
E.g., When I need to use the Frequent Responses, I try to put them in an Identification comment so those won’t show up when I’m searching for comments in my own words.
The downside, though, is as mentioned in the other thread…when I try to be efficient and include a comment in my own words in an ID, I can’t find it later.
As observation’s search parameters use to be similar in api and web interfaces, I think both requests are pretty related and people reading here might also be interested in those comments.
Hi there, I’ve tried looking but can’t figure out if this feature has been implemented or not. I’d like to be able to search for observations of a particular taxon with any comments. I find this useful because those comments often include identification tips.
I found this: https://www.inaturalist.org/comments but there doesn’t seem to be a way to add the taxon and place id to the url to get a search result (or I just can’t get it right!).
For example, I’d like to find all observations of Peck’s skipper (taxon_id=133631) in Canada (place_id=6712) with comments. Or at least sort the list of observations by the number of comments / if they have comments.
This Filter Feature would be found via Identify activity.
It would be helpful if the major FILTER
(where we choose to ID birds, for example)
had an additional selection for:
Check here to display observations for which I have left a comment.
NOT comments attached to IDs, but just separate comments.
Currently you have
Check here to see
Observations that I have Reviewed (IDd)
Sometimes we might not want to commit to an ID.
Instead we might make a comment to suggest some ID possibilities
for discussion.
and it would be nice to get back to those
observations for follow up.
I would also love to search a particular person’s comments. @johnascher is the powerhouse working on bees, but just today, we have traveled to a new country and uploaded a bunch of new plants, got about 150 comments, but with johnascher’s bee comments mixed in.
What I really dislike is when I open the one at the end of the list, then the entire list disappears and I have to dig through my entire dashboard to find them. Could people’s names be added to the search filter? For example, Washington USA + Bees + johnascher.