I started ID’ing on iNaturalist earlier this year as a way to train my species knowledge and to see some ‘summer species’ during the winter time and the whole platform really grew on me.
Today I came across two comments from @nathantaylor (I will link both below) that made me curious what the work flow of more experienced identifiers looks like, especially the after-care of identifying so to say.
So, how do you manage your notifications/ID’d observations?
(I currently try to go through every notification to check if someone is disagreeing with my ID before starting to ID new observations. Occasionally I will also check if I have any maverick IDs via my ID-stats.)
Also, I noticed that as soon as I open a notification, all other notifications are marked as ‘read’ which complicates my current after-care process. Does the same happen to you?
(The two comments that sparked these questions: comment 1 and comment 2)
whenever I open iNat and have more than 10 notifications, I click on the notifications button to expand the dropdown and then right click on each individual notification and open it in a new tab; this ensures I don’t lose any. Note that if you have more than around 200ish notifications at once, it will only display that many. Once you open those 200 and then refresh the page, the next batch (up to another 200) will then show.
I also try to look at every notification, but there is a stitch in time around my midnight, and some of my ‘today’s’ notifications hide in yesterday – so I check a few more until I reach ‘I do remember THAT one’.
There is also a separate notification management tool, which I looked at, but don’t use. It has enthusiastic users !
I unfollow / unsubscribe as soon as I lose interest in an obs.
This sounds like you’re processing notifications from the dropdown of the speech bubble. I click the speech bubble to see them, then click it again to dismiss the dropdown, look at the latest thing in my feed and when it was, then refresh the page, find the same time, and read up from there. Occasionally (usually because people I’m following have uploaded lots of obs, which don’t appear below the speech bubble), I have to hit the “Más” button at the bottom of the page.
I completely ignore the ‘speech bubble’ and only use the dashboard. I’ve found I do occasionally miss things where multiple things have happened on a given observation since I last looked (so if there’s a comment followed by an ID, I’ll only see the ID unless I ‘expand’ or am tagged), but being aware of the problem helps a bit, and I find it easier to work with than the speech bubble dropdown - which is currently sitting on 10,000 because I never clear it!
In my settings, I’ve turned off all the notifications except those that mention me. This means I only get notified in a few cases: 1. someone mentions me, 2. a comment is made on an observation I follow, 3. someone disagrees with my identification, or 4. someone provides a finer ID them mine. To be honest, I don’t know how people function without doing this.
I generally open new observations in new tabs. This has the unfortunate consequence of taking up a lot of space on my browser, but at least I see them all. If I have a lot, I try to open as many I can through my dashboard, so that I can go through them at my own pace.
Probably more controversially, I also often “opt out” of observations where I’ve previously added identifications above species level when someone provides a finer ID (“opting out” means I withdraw my ID, unfollow the observation, and mark it as unreviewed; I use Megachile’s Universal Metadata Tool [ https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/announcing-the-universal-metadata-tool-beta-by-megachile/53182 ] to do so with 1 click). While not exactly ideal, it does prevent me from seeing notifications on that observation. The main reason I started doing this is that it made it easier to download my identifications, but another byproduct is that I can be pretty confident that most of my identifications are at species level (which gives me personal satisfaction).
With these settings and behaviors, my notifications rarely go above 20, and it’s extremely rare that they get anywhere close to 50, even when I’ve been inactive for a while. Now, I do commonly end up with over 100 tabs that as I accumulate observations that I don’t know what to do with, but that’s another story.
I really am not compatible with the dashboard. I don’t like how I cannot really have an overview about where I am in my notifications when laoding new ones, it drives me crazy (why not site numbers like in the identification setting?) So I never use it.
Following the notifications via that bubble icon is not satisfying either.. I usually have several hundred notifications a day. I will open the ones important to me (mentions, comments, my own) in new tabs and work through them. I will skim the other notifications for e.g. IDers I feel I need to follow up (e.g. because I know they will not mention me even if correcting or because I don’t know them but they went through a large badge and I want to check whether I need to be aware of corrections). Because of those cases I do not feel comfortable switching those notifications off. With this kind of approach I am regularly losing a lot of notifications when e.g. I have internet issues, click on the wrong thing and the dropdown closes.. those notifications are then lost to me. I regularly run into observations where I had been mentioned months or years ago but I never reacted.. well, at least it shows that I am coming around to those observations anyways at some point
I would love either the dashboard to be updated to a version with site numbers and filters for certain news (new uploads, new comments, new disagreements..) so it would feel useable to me and/or to have the notifications searchable and maybe colour coded or something for different kinds of notifications (agreeing, disagreeing, refining IDs, comments, mentiones, own observations) .
I hate the most that I do not get separate notifications for disagreements, thus those observations ending up in sometimes long struggles for the right ID because noone dared to @tag me.. and I only find out after the fact when many IDers had to be already involved and I am already maverick.
Pre-Maverick spiders 21K bit daunting. But you could sort what you have reviewed already. What is RG or still Needs ID. (Have retrieved a South African batch to pick over myself)
to be fully honest I have about six or seven saved Identify searches and pick one based on vibes. as for notifications I open any that have comments or mentions or that are on an interesting observation + a random sample of the others. I message people who leave me a lot of notifications to ask them to tag me when I need to do something eg withdraw. and I check my mavericks. it’s… less a process and more… idk. I have adhd.
Ajott, I do basically exactly what you do, except I’ve never gotten around to using the external tool (no real reason; I just don’t). I, too, would like a better notification system, but I’m not going to stop identifying while waiting for one.
You suggested the maverick project to me as a fix before and I tried.. but as I do a looooot of corrections, it does not really make my life easier unfortunately. Most of them I am in a disagreement for a reason, because I placed it there.. there are almost 3000 observations I am involved in.. many of them are actually already resolved, and for almost all of them I am in a disagreement, because I think I am right
It is a good thought, though, thanks for the suggestion. Might work better for others
Thanks everyone for sharing your strategies! Now that I got some ideas, I will play around a bit with how I handle my notifications according to your recommendations and see what works best for me:)
