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,”…

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 .

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

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…

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

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

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

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-observatio…

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.

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-rela…

Users misunderstanding tagging

General

yayemaster December 10, 2025, 2:47pm 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).

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Users misunderstanding tagging

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