If anything I’d like fewer observations on an Identify page. I don’t have the best hardware or the fastest internet so I’m often waiting 30+ seconds for a page to load. I’d love to be able to back that down to like, 20. I think the best course of action may be to have an option in settings with several number options to choose from or a custom entry box.
Your other feature requests, though, I am completely on board with.
My own barely significant feature request is that I would like a heart or like button so people can “thank” identifiers without bothering them with a ping and/or just show some love to funny or insightful comments. It would probably be like reddit, where you don’t even get a notification when someone likes your post.
I didn’t even know that you could do that! I would love that to be a more easy-to-find function–esp if there’s also a way to filter out IDs on your own observations, as I have decided, for some reason (the reason is autism) to specialise in identifying Araucaria trees throughout North and South America and it’d be neat to see that more clearly.
For what it’s worth, this is what I use as a default comment for placeholders when I am IDing unknowns. I make minor tweaks based upon specific circumstances.
It looks like you added something to the ID field that didn’t match with the iNat taxonomy database (perhaps due to poor internet connection or spelling variation). This created a temporary “Placeholder” that doesn’t help people find your observation. That placeholder is overwritten when someone else IDs an observation for you. I am preserving your placeholder in case you or another identifier will find it useful for improving the identification. I am adding broad IDs to observations without a searchable ID in the system. If I have targeted the wrong organism, please let me know.
I then copy and paste the placeholder in the comment. I realize the placeholder project is trying to preserve placeholders in an observation field, but I think it is easier for most users to find it in a comment. Not everyone knows to look in observation fields and I don’t think those fields are visible on the main screen in Identify.
Something I don’t get is why does ‘Explore’ automatically open every observation ever in the whole world, being able to set a default custom region and timeframe, like ‘Last 7 days,’ would be nice, since I don’t ever look at things across the world and seeing a map covered in orange isn’t very useful. Maybe you can but it’s not obvious to me.
Thanks, never knew that was there. I still would like to define a region a bit more tailored to my location than what I can find available, as you can draw with a square or circle with explore. I found a region that is a quadrant of my state, which is about the size of area I’d want, but that’s not the best since I’m right on the border.
That’s a good point. Perhaps in addition to being customisable, as suggested above, the transition between pages could be smoothed out?
I find much of the annoyance of having a small number of observations per page is the “skip to next page/ review more unreviewed” menu when you hit the end of the current page. I’d prefer if I’d automatically be shown the next observation. In that case (at least for my “workflow”) per_page wouldn’t matter so much.
Do you use the location filter (the one right next to the taxon-filter) or the place filter (the one in the expanded filter box)?
They’re not the same and usually, for large regions with precise borders the latter is the better option.
(Switching those or even just merging them could be another minor feature request. The place filter is more useful to me 9 times out of ten, so I don’t know why that’s the one hidden away in the expanded filter box.)
If you have taken the time to open the observation, just click on the reviewed box in that observation before you close it. Then you won’t feel the need to review the whole page.
Although I think everyone agrees the current system is not ideal, I don’t think it’s fair to say the staff ever thought placeholders were “useless”. If they felt that to be true, they probably wouldn’t have designed the system that way originally…
The one that sticks in my mind is someone observing baobabs in Madagascar. Numbering each individual as they went. Number 43. Ooh A Baobab. And their number was deleted.
When we started the project I checked the first 20. A small, random
sample.
Half had useful info which iNat silently discards.
10 tiny typos which iNat refuses to recognise.
1 correct scientific name DISCARDED in favour of - It’s a dicot, duh!
Something that sits between a bug fix and a feature request, is to correctly internationalise the format of dates in the Android app. Being in Australia our standard date format is DD-MM-YYYY, not the US style of MM-DD-YYYY.
Scrolling through my observations in the Android app, the more recent ones show the date (top RHS) in the form “Jan 3” (easily readable and fine), but older ones switch format to 12/14/24 which, when the day part is less than 13, is immediately confusing for me. The date format of the phone system should be used, not the default US one.
Thank you, this has come in quite handy! My computer sounds a lot less like it’s going to explode now.
the sheer number of hidden search parameters in the wiki is quite overwhelming, I wish I learned about them sooner.
A drop-down list for tags you have used. I can’t use tags as much as I want, because I can’t remember exactly how I named it. (with - , _, all together, English, German…). I actually made a feature request once, but nobody was interested.
