By default they are set to “On” but you can choose to turn either or both to “Off” (make sure to click Save Settings after you make a change).
Turning off notifcations for Infraspecies IDs will prevent notifications being generated for you when someone adds an infraspecies ID (a subspecies, variety, etc), that agrees with your species level ID. For example, if you ID an observation as Columba livia and someone adds an ID of Columba livia var. domestica to the observation, you will not be notified of their ID.
Turning off notifications for Non-disagreeing Ancestor IDs will prevent notifications being generated for you when someone adds an ID that is an ancestor of your ID but does not explicitly disagree with it. For example, if you ID an observation as Columba livia and someone adds a non-disagreeing ID of order Columbiformes, you will not be notified of their ID.
However, if someone includes a remark with their ID, eg “You can tell this is X subspecies due to Y features,” you will be notified of their ID even if it meets one of the above criteria.
You can read some background for these changes in this forum thread.
When the subspecies is later elevated to a full species, and that previous non-disagreeing subspecies ID is now a disagreeing species ID, how does that work?
These are good additions, thanks. :-) I still wish we could make a distinction between our own observations and the observations of others for which we’ve made IDs. I only want to see disagreeing IDs on other people’s observations. I want to see ALL IDs, both agreeing and disagreeing, on my own observations. Maybe this would be harder to implement than I realize?
This is great news! Hey, everybody who muted me so they didn’t have to see all those subspecies ID’s, you can undo that now, and maybe we can talk again? Lol.
I still sense an odd prejudice in other people against infraspecies in general… but I’m pro-taxon at any rank!
to the main topic, my instance of these notification options are on by default as intended – I’ll probably let them remain so. I think the basic distinction between identifications that are “agreeing [+ identical]” versus “everything else” is good enough for me… I kind of see the logic behind the new options, but I feel like they have much more limited use cases, except for those people who do have what I’m semi-facetiously calling infraspecies prejudice. I just don’t see enough non-disagreeing ancestor IDs pop up in my feed to need to weed them out, except for a small handful from other people participating in the Onboarding New Users trial, who are presumably being asked to add IDs on observations they wouldn’t normally interact with and so sometimes dole out Magnoliopsida or Plantae identifications reluctantly.
Great! Can a notification preference be added for confirming IDs that are only in my observations. For example if I add an ID to someone else’s observation and someone confirms it, I shouldn’t receive a notification, but if someone confirms my ID on my own observation, then I receive a notification.
It seems that there is incorrect translation to Russian in the Settings: it says that you won’t get a notification if an ancestor taxon disagrees with the community taxon, which is the opposite of the function.
Если вы отключите эту функцию, вы больше не будете получать уведомления, когда кто-то добавляет ID предка таксона от вашей ID и не согласуется с таксоном сообщества.
There is one “not” (“не согласуется”) which flips the meaning to the opposite.
Also the name is “Не согласующиеся идентификации предков”, which is Disagreeing Ancestor IDs rather than Non-disareeing.
Don’t know where the flag for translation is, so I decided to write it here.
Great features btw, disabled the first one as I usually know the ssp. and just feel lazy to check in the guide, so I don’t need a reminder for now.
Hmm. Did you have any other notifications turned off in your preferences? One of my test accounts has them both set to “On” so it doesn’t appear to be happening to everyone. That account already had all notifications prefs sent to “On” when these new options were added.
I’m definitely more on the “lumper” side of things and I unless I see a clear need to ID to subspecies (eg conservation status, clear physcial distinctions, sympatric subspecies) I don’t ID to subspecies. But a lot of people do (which is fine) and I don’t want to be notified that someone added a subspecies ID of the only subspecies known in the southern california or something. I’ve muted quite a few people due to their notifications overwhelming more relevant-to-me ones, so hopefully I can unmute them now.
I’m really happy to see these options implemented, it will let me better monitor the IDs I need to address much more easily. Thank you to the team this is a real improvement!
it’s not realistic to expect no changes in taxonomy ever to occur. this is especially true in the case of elevating infraspecies to the rank of species, which is so common because often in the past variation was observed (hence distinct taxa at least at a lower level) but the importance of them was not appreciated.
your previous question is probably only answerable by staff with knowledge of how the new features work, so I will not attempt to address it.
On my account, they both appeared as “off” initially, so I didn’t do anything.
However, the next day, I logged in and saw a subspecies notification that I shouldn’t have received if the settings were working. I checked my profile and noticed that the two new options were now set to “on”. I had not changed them.
Then I set them manually to “off” and saved, and they now appear to be working as intended.
