Users misunderstanding tagging

General
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I realized today that some users have attempted to get my attention on observations by adding my username as a tag on their observation rather than @-mentioning me in a comment. I’m almost 100% sure the confusion comes from the fact that people (including me) sometimes use “tag” to mean “@-mention,” as in “tag me in a comment if you split this observation.” I don’t think any changes are needed since this seems to be a pretty uncommon issue from what I can tell. Instead, this is just a friendly reminder for frequent identifiers to check for observations where their usernames have been added as tags!

Here’s a url to check- just replace my username (ciafre) with yours: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?q=ciafre&search_on=tags

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I read this and thought “oh nobody would do that,” but then tried it and found 9 observations tagged with my name! Thanks for the tip, @ciafre.

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Wait that’s so weird! I never knew you could do this(and frankly, I don’t know how someone would have found this).

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I’m glad you posted this! I found a slew of tags!

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The only reason I found it because a friend recently tagged (@-mentioned) me on an observation where a user clearly tried to @-mention me in the comments two years ago but didn’t add an @-sign, and I just happened to notice that they also added a tag to the observation with my username. Given that I only had two observations tagged with my username, I can’t believe I ever noticed!

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Wow, thanks. I found a small number of tags for me, too.

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That’s odd for sure. I had 4, and they were all taxa I have no clue how to identify.

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Thanks. Never searched for myself, and got a few hits as well.

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I had 16! If there’s a way for someone to use something incorrectly, there will be some that find a way to do it.

But honestly, there’s not much information about what tags are supposed to be used for:

https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000169941-what-are-tags-observation-fields-and-annotations-

A popup window would be a helpful addition. Like this:

image
image490×291 22.4 KB

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I’d never realized this was an available use of the “Tags” variable. I just viewed that as “keywords”. I found 21 observations which had included me (gcwarbler) as an actual “Tag”. I’ve DM-ed a couple of folks who were doing that repeatedly and coaxed them to use @-mentions instead.

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I like the idea of adding a tooltip clarifying what tags are for. It would be helpful if we could get notifications whenever someone adds our username as a tag so we wouldn’t have to check periodically, but that could cause some problems for users whose usernames could conceivably be used as un-related tags (e.g. those who use a genus, noun, or place as their username)- and would probably be a pain to code.

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Wow, 22. Thanks, @ciafre. It would never have occurred to me to look for this. Clearly some further explanatory feature is needed to divert users away from this.

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That’s so funny. We have 71! Mostly because of the use of the Italian “tracce” , but a whole set where someone was trying to get help with their coral IDs.

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39 for me dating back to 2020…makes me feel bad for missing them

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@kestrel maybe a prompt to work in to the upcoming ID-a-thon ? (Especially for iNatters with a taxon name / noun / place for their user name) @mention etiquette. Not too many. Not too often. Check their profile first.

Oh! Daunting - how to find the ones where the iNatter name was intended ?

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?q=kestrel&search_on=tags

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/328964360 :grin:

PS @ciafre you have 2 more …

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