To "People (you) Follow" add "last active" date

I regularly go through the list of people I follow to see if there are new observations they have posted that I can add ID information to. This list has no column for “last active”. I then find myself clicking on “view observations” for each name to see if they have new observations. If there was a column for “last active” I wouldn’t have to click on “view observations” for everyone that hasn’t been active since I last checked.

Isn’t this what the dashboard is for? You get updates (and emails if you’ve set your preferences that way) every time someone you follow adds an observation.

5 Likes

You could also bookmark a search for all observations by people you follow:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?user_id=akreager,ameliam,amphibianaficionado,amy1114,angelique_k,annaa_tthomas,aromatisse,bridgetspencer,crosa,djevergreen,gbk,harsiparker,josegarrido,kathawk,lyndas,masonmaron,naturenut2006,nickandrews1,peterzika,rambryum,sedgequeen,stephrivest,tomerler

The added benefit there is you can sort by taxon or other info as well.

5 Likes

Yeah and that might be helpful because you could review observations that you didn’t identify.

2 Likes

@thomaseverest no, that is not only what my dashboard is for. It has a lot more information than what are the new postings by the people I am following. I go to my profile, generate the list of people I am following, then often starting with those I am most interested in giving ID’s to, I check their recent observations, but many of them have no observations since the last time I checked. It would be very easy to add a column saying when they were last active, and if they weren’t active since I checked last I wouldn’t have to check their observations.

I see that your link shows only observations by those people that I follow, but I don’t see how I “bookmark” it.

You have to use a browser bookmark, iNat doesn’t have an internal bookmark feature.

You could also save it to a journal post if you want to use it across multiple devices.

3 Likes

Thank you @jwidness for giving me that method, in spite of its limitations. I have now bookmarked that on my browser (not being a very tech-savvy guy, something I only now figured out how to do), but using this bookmark doesn’t allow me to choose the order in which I check the people I follow for new observations, as I can with the list I generate of the people I follow, which has a column to check their observations (often none since I last checked), but no column indicating how recently they have made any observations, or have otherwise been active.

I’ve voted for this, since it seems to be of potential use. I personally wouldn’t use it because I have the new observations of people I follow showing up on my dashboard.

1 Like

@stewartwechsler there are some changes you can make to @jwidness 's idea. You can click on filters to tweak the search. If you want to include obs that have made it to research grade, click on the checkbox for that. It should already be set to most recently added at the top. You can select a certain date or range of dates added to be sure you are only seeing new ones. You can also mark ones you’ve seen as “reviewed” and they won’t show up again even if they are in the date range you choose. You can mark obs individually as reviewed or do a whole page with the mark all reviewed at the bottom of the page. If you add an ID or comment to an obs, it will be automatically marked reviewed.

3 Likes

Thank you @lappelbaum for your additional suggestions. @thomaseverest I will add that, while previously I thought I had too many other things on my dashboard to go through to get to the observations of people I was following, I now see it isn’t that bad. That said, I still like to be sure I first get to what I might call my “best students”, who I estimate will do the most with what I can offer, and who value it the most, which using that list of who I follow allows.

Sounds like a great use for @jwidness 's search tool. Just list your “best students” in your version of the link then you’ll be sure you didn’t miss any of their observatons. :+1:

1 Like

Glad to see I’m not the only one who has a draft journal post with a bunch of iNaturalist links and observations I’m going to come back too!