Allow observers to unobscure dates for their manually obscured observations

iNaturalist recently started obscuring dates on all observations with obscured locations (i.e. it now shows August 2021 instead of August 14, 2021). I understand the rationale for doing this on auto-obscured, sensitive species. Here is my issue. I post hundreds of moth photos taken in my backyard. Location is obscured because I don’t want to give away my exact house location. But it is unfortunate that the dates are all obscured, because flight dates are valuable information for insects. I would like a feature where users can choose to unobscure observation dates for observations where they manually obscured the location. Maybe a toggle account setting. (Again, this would NOT apply to auto-obscured species. Only manually obscured observations.)

I would like that as well, I need to obscure the location of some species, but I have uploaded other species from the same site on the same date, so there is really no problem at all for anyone interested to find the exact location

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Don’t forget to vote for your own request!

This is the same issue I have: I obscure the location of organisms observed at my home because I don’t want to just hand out the GPS location of where I live. There’s no need to obscure the dates of those organisms.

6 Likes

I just noticed this as well, I obscure all of my locations but I definitely don’t wish to obscure the dates and times of the observations.

5 Likes

I didn’t realize this until now but I agree there needs to be a compromise. A lot of my obscured observations don’t require the date to be obscured.

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It all was discussed in original topic btw https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/obscuring-observations-now-obscures-the-date-of-comments-and-ids/24929

We understand the desire here, but it’s not something we’ll be implementing. It will make what’s already a confusing functionaliy more complicated, and there are existing ways to obtain access to the obscured dates and locations if need be (user-to-user trust, projects, direct messages, etc).