What happens next?

[yerbasanta]

@spiphany

I don’t “love getting hundreds or thousands of notifications”

I was being a little tongue-in-cheek, sorry if it was offensive.

@spiphany

…but I find it useful to see who agreed with what, particularly if my ID was one I was not very confident about. It also helps to get a general sense of the status of observations (which ones get ID’d quickly and which ones still need attention) and, in cases where there are conflicting IDs, whether I need to consider tagging someone to help resolve it.

You should get a notification if the ID is different from your own, and/or they leave a comment. I don’t know how much you’d gain from getting notified someone agrees with your unconfident ID, but to each their own!

[yerbasanta]

@pande

I started to do general ID’s on a group all by the same person to then realise they had only just been added. I now realise he was probably going to fix them later. I hope he wasn’t too miffed at my amateur effort!!!

@pande You can filter ‘random’ observations in reverse chronological order for a location you’re familiar with to look at years-old observations with no form of ID to avoid identifying observations that may be edited by the original observer in the next few hours/days.

When I have tons of observations to add, I sometimes will bulk upload as well, and am not a huge fan of low-level IDs (it’s a waste of time for both sides).

I understand that’s the risk I run if/when I do this, but as a pretty avid identifier myself, I try to bias either toward date-agnostic ID or prefer older observations 1st so I don’t run into this issue or step on the toes/educational experience/discussion that’s usually more likely in newer observations.

If ‘filter’ settings are too much of a pain or difficult to understand, I get it and wouldn’t mind identifiers getting their training wheels on as much since they might not know better or know how to change their settings to avoid this issue.

[DianaStuder]

@yerbasanta

I don’t know how much you’d gain from getting notified someone agrees with your unconfident ID, but to each their own!

I gain a huge amount from WHO agreed!

[spiphany]

@yerbasanta

You should get a notification if the ID is different from your own, and/or they leave a comment. I don’t know how much you’d gain from getting notified someone agrees with your unconfident ID, but to each their own!

I’m aware of how turning off notifications for agreeing IDs works. I still want to see agreements.

If a specialist confirms an ID for a species that I am still learning, then it tells me that I am on the right track.

If an observer quickly and uncritically agrees to every single ID that I suggest, regardless of whether I comment that I am not sure, then I know that maybe I should be cautious about suggesting species-level IDs for this person in the future, or maybe I need to tag a specialist to have someone else knowledgeable check the observation.

If a user I don’t recognize begins adding agreeing IDs for difficult species, maybe it is a new specialist who would be a valuable person to be in contact with – or maybe it is a new user who is overly-enthusiastically applying the CV or using “agree” like a like button for any observation they think is cool, and they might benefit from a note explaining why this behavior is discouraged.

If an observation or an ID for particular taxa gets no follow-up at all, this is helpful to know, too, because it gives me a general sense of where there is a lack of identifiers and what observations still need attention. If I turn off agreeing IDs, I lose this reference point, because I don’t get notifications for the observations that have been confirmed either.

There are plenty of notifications that are not particularly relevant for me – namely, refining IDs for taxa that aren’t a particular interest for me and I added a broad ID to sort it for the specialists. But turning off notifications for agreements wouldn’t keep me from getting notifications in such cases; I have to manually unfollow.

So no, turning off agreeing IDs would not be useful for me and I think it is a good idea that notifications for agrees is the default, so that new users see when they are getting positive feedback – their ID was correct, someone engaged with the observation (rather than just negative feedback: comments asking them to fix something, disagrees).

(Most of what I observe and ID are taxa that do not get half a dozen agreeing IDs; I might feel differently if I were primarily a birder.)

[yerbasanta]

@spiphany

I’m aware of how turning off notifications for agreeing IDs works. I still want to see agreements.

I was really replying to the original poster, do whatever you want with your settings, it doesn’t affect anyone else! :)

[yerbasanta]

@pande a couple more threads on contributing to iNat I found from open tabs I had up earlier:

An awesome list here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ways-to-help-out-on-inat-wiki/1983

Instructions on how to annotate observations (please don’t do this for taxa other than those you know the life stages/phenology of well though!) :)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/using-identify-to-annotate-observations/1417

[spiphany]

You advised the original poster in bold text to turn off notifications for agreeing IDs, and presented it as something everyone should do (should be the default) – not as “I personally find this useful because…”.

I think there are arguments both for and against doing so, and I think it is reasonable that they should have information about different perspectives so that they can make an informed decision. You said you didn’t see any value in seeing agreeing notifications, so I was explaining why I find it helpful.