Settings to control observation subscription

Feature Requests
1

I wrote a script that posts GenBank accession numbers as an observation field to iNaturalist observations that have corresponding GenBank records. Unfortunately, I used my personal account rather than setting up a separate account for the script, so I’m now subscribed to thousands of observations that I don’t actually care about, which has caused my home feed and notifications to become a firehose of junk. Apparently, I’m not the first person to run into this problem, as several other people have done the exact same thing.

It would be great if there was a place where you could control what actions trigger observation subscription:

  • Creating an observation
  • IDing an observation
  • Commenting on an observation
  • Adding an observation field

If this existed, I would definitely turn off the last one. As an alternative, I would suggest not automatically subscribing everyone to observations when they add an observation field. I don’t think people expect this, and it can easily lead to having an overwhelming number of subscriptions.

2

if you know how to script stuff, just use a script to unsubscribe yourself via POST /v1//subscriptions/observation/{id}/subscribe.

4 Likes
3

A side note based on the request but I disagree with the idea of

iNat is pretty clear that each user should only have one account except in some quite limited exceptions (professional/organizational accounts, etc.)

Having additional accounts just to run scripts makes it very difficult to determine which user is responsible for the action that the additional account took. If there’s a problem with the additional account’s actions, who can other users contact to fix it? An account purely for running scripts isn’t likely to be monitored as closely by the user who created it - will the person behind the account see notifications or messages that other users leave for them? Making accounts like this also opens the door to posting machine-generated content, and can allow users to get around limits to things like API calls (eg, coordinating actions from multiple accounts to exceed the limits iNat has for single accounts). So I really don’t think users having additional accounts for running scripts should be encouraged/allowed.

2 Likes
4

I do expect it, and as long as you’re annotating by hand, it’s unlikely that you get overwhelmed with notifications. Doing it via script smells of machine-generated content. One should probably think carefully about the implications, including the notifications, before doing that.

1 Like