Users misunderstanding tagging

General
1

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

2

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.

3

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

4

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

5

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!

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

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:

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10

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.

11

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.

12

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.

13

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.

14

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

15

@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 …