howdy! i’m wondering how y’all deal with a backlog of notifications? i slacked off a bit checking my notifs and now have a lovely 605 to look at… i love seeing all of my notifs to correct/explain my ids, respond to questions and pings, so on. but if i just click the notif button on the site i have one chance to open 605 tabs before i have to scroll through the home page updates and sift through a bunch of observations and stuff on a weirdly formatted page. is there any other way to pull up notifications? or am i just gonna have to say goodbye to a lot of them and remember to not let notifs sit in the future lol. hopefully my wording made sense :)
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My method is to hold down on an individual one so it opens a new tab and do that so they don’t vanish. 600 is a lot to do that with. A lot of the time, unfortunately, I accept the loss and don’t get to them all. Oftentimes it will be a lot of notifications for the same thing from a same person and I have to assume they’re mostly for the same thing so I don’t need to check each one, such as somebody identifying something to subspecies or something. I don’t have a perfect system but I don’t know if one exists!
Unless the link up there ^ is the perfect one.
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On the Android app they don’t vanish but you can only see the most recent 200.
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If your notifications have already disappeared, you may have to change the status of viewed to “true” in the tool. When using this tool, I generally open 10 at a time into a new tab. Then look through the tabs for disagreements and comments, closing each tab after reviewing. I’ve never had to do 600, but 100 doesn’t take too long. You could favorite ones you want to go back to prevent getting bogged down.
For routine upkeep (50 or less), I work backward on the All Updates tab of the home screen (without clicking the notifications alert). After I think I’ve gotten them all, I refresh and check the notification count. Sometimes there’s a few I missed. I click the notification alert for those and open them into new tabs from the dropdown list.
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I started unfollowing some of them that I know I probably won’t have to change my ID on but I also can have days where I get like 50 notifications that are all similar. I can’t imagine with 600, but with 50 I can kind of skim and “Control+click” them into new tabs to quickly glance if they need any actions
Join the queue for better notification management!
We have only the one option - to turn off agreements. But I want to see WHO agreed with me. So that’s none!
I try to open and check each one, but the sequence is weird. After I have cleared back to midnight, I find a few more from ‘today among yesterday’.
I unfollow each obs as soon as I can. Keeping only the few active where the discussion is rolling on.
But I am counting on pisum’s tool to catch up before the Great Southern Bioblitz.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-handle-a-growing-number-of-notifications/34735/7
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/notifications-on-inaturalist-please-share-your-ideas/374 191 comments
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/unsubscribing-from-observations/42817/4
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-access-old-alerts/41171/8
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/notifications-for-data-quality-changes/41744/8
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/managing-large-number-of-comments-in-my-inbox/30627/4
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/whats-your-personal-record-for-of-header-notifications/3935 I expect about 100 a day
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/notifications-only-for-disagreeing-ids/32193/8
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalist-2019-team-retreat-follow-up/373/31 back to 2019 and still waiting hopefully to see promised changes roll out.
Meanwhile vynbos has left iNat altogether due to too many notifications - CID algorithm has to be pushed to overturn their orphaned IDs. Others say glibly, never look at my notifications and don’t expect anyone else to either.
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this is incredible, thank you. Is there a section where all user-created tools like this are visible?
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I wonder if @pisum has a list?
Otherwise search across the forum to see if he has answered your other questions.
PS found a link on his profile
https://github.com/jumear/stirfry
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Nioce link
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Over 600 is impressive! I’ve gotten more than 400 a few times, but not 600. When I get a whole lot of notifications to deal with I set aside a day to deal with them. I can usually clear them in a day, especially if I skip past recent observations from those observers who I “follow” but who post MANY photos. Sometimes I have to leave the site open on the computer overnight to finish the next day.
(The concept of regularly doing iNaturalist on a cell phone with the tiny screen and the tiny keypad that requires one to do hunt-and-peck typing boggles my mind. But apparently some people do it.)
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600 is possibly the most i’ve had at once, i’m not sure. i don’t get notifs for people uploading observations though. i think that would be too many notifs for me 
but i got through all of the notifications just fine! this link was super helpful :)
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I’ve racked up a couple thousand notifs in the last week, and had the opportunity to compare the site-presented notifs vs. @pisum’s notifications tool at scale. I found that these items are missing from the tool:
- @mentions to you (this is the biggest deal)
- faves of your obs
- field additions to your obs
To see the @mentions, I used this workaround on PC:
- Pull up https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observations_updates.html and view by 200
- Scroll through to see the commented ones and look at those (ctrl-click obs number link)
- Scroll through to find the ones where it looks like my id is an outlier (ctrl-click obs number link)
- Pull up my iNat page in another tab and click the site’s notifs to see the first 200
- Look at the top of the pulldown to see if any were added while doing the above (ctrl-click the new ones to see them)
- Scroll through the pulldown looking for the ones that say “mentioned you” instead of “added an identification” (ctrl-click the relevant notification); plus faves and fields if any
- Refresh the iNat page when done with the pulldown of 200
- Right after, refresh the stirfry page to see the next set of 200
- Repeat above steps until all notifs are cleared
My 1 700 is down to the last 900 …
800 !
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Mine are built up lately because after my laptop keyboard broke early August, my touchscreen also broke early October! So at home/recreational I can only work via a game controller (button mapped with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and Win-V) and a mouse. The keyboard onscreen is now where I have to use a mouse to type the letters (bonus carpal flare). :P
I used a keyboard available at work to write the above. (Apologies if anyone is expecting any recent convos with me beyond my saying “thanks” or “?”)
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I had to get a new laptop. iNat killed the previous one.
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RIP your laptop of noble service! I’m still second in line in my family budget for upcoming repair/replace…
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there’s a note on the start screen of the page:
This page gets data primarily from the iNaturalist Observations Updates API endpoint (and also gets a few additional data points for each observation). This means that only notifications related to identifications and comments from the last 3 months can be returned. Mentions on observations you are not following can be returned only if you explicitly set observations_by = following (others). Older notifications and notifications related to other activity like faves will not be included in these results.
it is possible to get mentions, but you have to explicitly look for observations_by=following in some of these cases. unfortunately, that’s just the way the API works.
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Thanks for the pointer!
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