Right now when I open iNat it shows 50 notifications. As soon as I click outside of the menu by accident, they will all disappear and I may miss some of the important tags/comments/updates, so I have to open them all at once in new tabs. And that means that I get “Too Many Requests” from iNat.
Why didn’t we reduce the max number of notifications that show at a time from 200 down to something more reasonable that won’t trigger “Too Many Requests” if I open them all at once?
Your idea seems reasonable.
Personally I don’t know why they don’t code them to not disappear! Or to stay a different color until clicked, as they do on the app.
The notification system is antiquated and very poorly optimized. The further the site grows, the more and more it becomes an issue. If iNaturalist truly has set a goal of 100 million users by 2030. This system, honestly probably the whole dashboard really needs an update.
The only “fix” I’ve been able to find for this is to use the iNat Next app to deal with notifications, since they won’t all disappear until they are individually opened on there. But the app has its own bugs still that also make responding to said notifications glitchy at times. If I check notifications on the website after I’ve received more than 10 I know I’ll lose many and its quite frustrating.
Also, I think I’m partly to blame for flooding your notifications lately, sorry if so! I’ve been adding a lot of IDs recently. If I see any that are important you are included on I can message you separately with links.
I had 900+ notifications when I logged in just now; I gave upa nd turned most of the notifications off.
The notifications system is an absolute nightmare and I really do hope they manage to figure something more practical and usable in the near future. In the meantime, I couldn’t continue making IDs if it weren’t for the excellent “Notifications Web Viewer” by pisum. I’m not in front of my computer at the moment and can’t find any other references, but I’m sure if you do a search on the forum, you’ll be able to find more information. It’s been a lifesaver for me.
Apologies for the inconvenience @edanko I was clearing old high level Mexican Diptera
Although I have probably gotten over 200 notifications from your IDing activities in the past week. You’re taking a lot of Chironomids out of being stuck at higher taxa levels, you even seem to be learning to recognize some of the more distinct ones. I think you’re doing good work and i appreciate it.
Did anything ever come of the notification-request topic?
I wasn’t on iNat back then, so I don’t know how it was before, but there are some really good feature requests in here that are still not added to iNat. (Treating IDs with comments differently than IDs, lumping similar notifications, differentiating between read/unread, etc.)
When I have too many notifications I use this tool to look at them:
https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observations_updates.html
It is very useful!
No worries–this happens to me all the time, and it’s usually the combined efforts of many people at once–which is good! I’m just hoping this can be more of a priority for someone to fix.
I get that this isn’t a priority right now for the iNat team because it only affects people who are already invested in iNat a lot. So how about a band-aid instead of a deep solution: Change it so that the max notifications that show at once is 10 or 20 instead of 200?
I use this website whenever I am flooded with observations:
https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observations_updates.html
Is there a tool that can exclude notifications generated by the activity of a particular user? As has been mentioned, the review work done by some community members can sometimes generate hundreds of notifications, which totally overwhelms my capacity of keeping up with them. I want to stress that this work is extremely beneficial and highly appreciated! I am not annoyed by it at all, but I can no longer process the feedback it creates on my end. However, I still would like to receive other notifications. We need some more advanced filtering mechanisms to deal with this problem.
If I mute a user, will I still receive notifications if they tag me though?
This is a poor solution for this problem unless one wants to cease all notifications of any kind from a user, effectively like a soft block. There is a big difference between not wanting to see 100s of notifications of identification activity, and never being notified from that user again including comments and tags.
Really there are few options to tailor your notification settings to your preference and prevent yourself from being overwhelmed. With muting it is everything, or nothing.
@thebeachcomber Yes, I know about the mute option, and I agree with @zoology123 that it is a very poor solution. It cuts off all contact with that individual (no @ tags, no personal messages), which is not what I want. It is a very drastic measure that was designed to deal with unpleasant community members, not as a filtering option.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/management-of-notifications/60134/40
still hoping for better management of our notifications. Maybe in 2026 ??
ya, this is tough especially since I have most notification types turned off. The minimum for me would be to be able to go back to any notifications where someone has explicitly pinged my username. I could deal with losing all the other notifications as long as I could still find those, maybe in a tab beside “your content” on the Dashboard, like “pings” or something.
Managing notifications via the website is a nightmare, but unfortunately I did not find a better way to deal with it. I often get tagged for adding IDs to some (problematic) observations and if I get more than 10 notifications, on the website whatever is over this number will just disappear after they get clicked and there is no way to get them back… I have to use the app to get through my list of older notifications but adding IDs from the app is not my favorite method, I prefer to use my computer’s big screen… So there should at least be a way to open older notifications via the web site… going through the dashboard is also impractical when there are too many.
