I think it would be great to see how many clicks web links have gotten on the iNaturalist website. This would look identical to the web link click count on the iNat forum pages.
Here is an example on how it look:
Here’s what it looks like on the iNat forum:
I think this would be a great little feature!
I right click/open in new tab most forum links because this way the counter doesn’t go up and nobody needs to know whether I clicked the link. If links on inaturalist behaved the same way, I’d do the she thing there. Presumably some other people open links in new tabs or windows for their own reasons, making such counters less than accurate.
I prefer to keep that feature for the forum and leave it out of the main iNat site. Part of the appeal of iNat, aside from the naturalist stuff, is that it doesn’t play the “look at me” games that other social media sites do.
Let’s keep that sort of thing for Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and Reddit and leave iNat as something more focused on the nature side of things.
In addition to the above points, I can imagine it would only breed frustration if a user sees their observation has gotten a lot of visits, but not a lot of movement (IDs, comments).
But also it means that it is a probematic observation not becuse nobody looks at it, plus it will be only for links, which are usually going to some search results or other webpages.
I like this feature and I wouldn’t hide my interest in someone else’s link, on the forum it’s cool when people gets views of what they post, that’s the reason and I feel it’s motivational.
I agree with @earthknight, adding the web link count would just encourage iNat to become another social media. If the view count was added then I would expect people to add photos for views rather than enjoying nature.
People, it’s “web link views” into your profile description, not “observation views”, so adding more photos won’t help anyhow.
@orlandob, gave a mock-up using a profile, but their suggestion never says it would be limited to just the profile.
But where else you can see links on the website? I only can think of comments if you post them there or project description, do I miss any major uses of them?
Why should it be allowed on the forum then?
The forum is a different sort of animal entirely.
Yes, just web link views not observation views.
Something that I forgot to clarify - the web link views would not be just limited to a profile description; it would occur when anyone at anytime provides a web link on the inat website and somebody visit’s it (without right click/opening of course).
While it’s fun to see these, I don’t see the extra storage space they’d require to be worth the benefit on iNat, so I’m going to close this request.
