Description of problem: Starting today at 11:24 am (noticed at 12pm) I got 1699 notifications, seemingly notifying me of every observation field value I’ve submitted in a long time, but as far as iNat is concerned, I submitted these 1699 fields earlier today (I did not, I have not uploaded or edited values in a few days, and didn’t open iNaturalist at all today until 12pm). When I open and then close my notifications, 100 of them are marked as “read” and reduced from the notification number.
Because the legacy Android app doesn’t support observation fields or their notifications, this issue isn’t visible there.
It’d be great to fix this bug and perhaps also get rid of notifications that I’m creating for my own posts in general? I don’t see the purpose of getting notified that I added a value to my own post.
I experienced a somewhat similar (though less extreme) issue today when I logged onto iNat on my laptop, where I got seven notifications: five informing me of fields I’d filled in on my own obs months ago, and two informing me of fields filled in on my obs by you (the OP). These last ones may have been legit new fields you recently added, idk. But I was very confused as to why I was getting notifs for things I’d done myself to my own obs, and a long time ago. I’ve added the same fields (“Host Plant ID” for plant gall obs) on hundreds of other observations, so it struck me as odd that I only got notifs for these 5. The only obvious common thread between all seven of the obs I got notified for is that they are gall obs on Quercus agrifolia. Mysterious!
I have a similar problem. I sometimes get hundreds of notifications a day due to observation field annotations I’ve made (but not regarding the observation fields themselves). I have no use for these notifications and they are just garbage to me. iNaturalist really needs a way to turn off automatic notification subscription for observation fields! Really the entire iNaturalist notification system needs to be revamped.
I thought it was not possible to be notified of annotations, I don’t receive any notifications for those and I can’t find any notification option for it in my setting either…
Also, sorry if I derailed from the original bug report. It sounds like not only are they getting spammed with notifications, but they are notifications about their own actions, which seems like a serious bug.
I haven’t received any of these, so it’s a little difficult for me to investigate. Any specifics, like which fields (in addition to Name of associated plant)? Are yo able to share a few URLs of observations that generated these notifications?
I’m wondering if the notifications are because of some recent taxon changes related to the observation fields you had added long ago? The fields had the values perhaps updated and thus the notifications to the author of the fields? I’ve had that happen, and I use nectar/host plant-related fields a lot.
Hi Tony, since there were 1699 notifications, I only looked closely at the first 300 or so. A lot of those were observations I uploaded 12-16 days ago, though that batch of 100 observations doesn’t account for all of those notifications, and logically couldn’t. It does seem to be giving me notifications for every observation field I submitted (within the affected fields) in 2026, at least from the ones I captured in both screen recordings (one of which is longer and shows more of the problem).
Some affected observations (I don’t know why the links are automatically changing to be long descriptions rather than just the URLs and I seemingly can’t control that):
Yeah the “get notified for your own actions” is a long-standing thing (bug?) but getting 1699 notifications of fields being added all at once, months later, is the bug that this post is aimed at getting fixed. I didn’t add any of those 1699 observation fields yesterday, so I shouldn’t be getting notifications time-stamped at 11:24am that day.
