I didn’t actually know that this is not allowed. I maintain a sort of “registry” of observers in my area and I know of a number of cases of people having two accounts. In some cases, it appears they have forgotten about one account, and created another, but I believe there’s been a case or two of folks using 2 accounts in parallel. I just assumed they had different accounts for different devices.
I’ve considered creating an Aux. account just to test out how certain things work in iNat (eg. when certain notifications are generated and when they are not). Good to know that this is expressly forbidden.
You’re fine - I myself have multiple accounts to test things like that, e.g. what something looks like to non-curators, or people who recently joined iNat, or troubleshooting adding IDs (to test/dummy observations).
From the Community Guidelines:
Suspendable offenses
- (!) Sockpuppet accounts. A sockpuppet account is an additional account set up to evade suspension, circumvent restrictions in functionality, or other forms of bad behavior, like confirming your own identifications. This does not include multiple accounts set up for multiple roles, e.g. a personal account and a professional account.
7 Likes
My recollection is that when this has come up in past forum discussions, users have been strongly discouraged by staff from creating multiple accounts in cases that some might feel fall under “personal” vs. “professional” uses of iNat.
These were things such as a taxon specialist wanting to separate their activities as a working scientist/researcher (IDing, observations of taxa in their area of speciality) from their activities as a nature-interested person (observations of other taxa not in their specialty, no IDing), in part as a way of keeping notifications separate.
If what is meant by “personal” vs. “professional” is “account used as a private person” vs “account used in an official capacity on behalf of an organization/institution/company” (which is what I remember being said in previous discussions), it might be desirable for this to be explained more clearly in the guidelines.
1 Like
Yeah this example of professional accounts used as individuals, and not one account representing the institution as a whole, comes to mind: https://www.inaturalist.org/search?utf8=✓&q=smpbiologist&commit=Go&source[]=users - it’s a scenario where data governance is important not only from an organizational perspective but also potentially regulatory.
1 Like
That’s not what I was asking about though. I don’t think there is a question whether this sort of thing is covered by “professional vs. personal”.
However, I also mentioned another case where one might reasonably conclude, based on the wording of the text, that it falls under “professional vs. personal” (i.e., creating separate accounts for separate sorts of activities on iNat, albeit with the “professional” part not part of one’s formal job responsibilities, just involving skills that one uses as a working scientist – one’s professional identity as oppose to one’s leisure identity). To my understanding people who have wanted to do this in the past have been told that this is not allowed.
If that is still true, it seems to me that the guidelines do not communicate this clearly; there is room for misunderstanding.
If this position has changed, there may be people who would like to know this.
2 Likes
If you can point to where staff said people shouldn’t use a separate account for work activities, that would be helpful. Otherwise I’m confused where the issue is as long as it doesn’t pertain to sockpuppetry as defined above.
2 Likes
I believe I was thinking of these discussions, where unless I misinterpreted something it was said that a separate professional account is permitted only if it is necessary as part of an official role:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/are-two-accounts-allowed-for-the-same-person/27028/
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/two-accounts-for-the-same-user/35150
I brought this up because reading your post it struck me as potentially confusing that creating multiple accounts for the purposes of troubleshooting would be OK…
…while people have been told that other instances of creating accounts for distinct purposes (e.g. IDing one’s speciality vs. observing other taxa) are not OK – even if the motivation for doing so is explicitly not to “sockpuppet” in the sense of “evade suspension, circumvent restrictions in functionality, or other forms of bad behavior, like confirming your own identifications”, but merely to keep different roles or activities separate.
Edit: I fully understand why having multiple accounts is not ideal even if one has the best of intentions (e.g., it is too easy to make mistakes like not noticing which account one has logged in with) and if it were generally condoned it would probably be challenging to monitor such accounts to determine that no abuse is happening. So my understanding has been that iNat has been pretty strict about the policy that multiple accounts are only allowed in exceptional circumstances.
Troubleshooting is obviously not a nefarious purpose, but neither are some of the other situations where people have wanted to create a second account and have been told they should not. So it feels a bit contradictory to what has been communicated more generally about having multiple accounts.
3 Likes
I have also gotten the impression from reading past forum threads that there are pretty much no circumstances under which you can have multiple accounts. If bouteloua hadn’t replied to ravasin already, I would have agreed with rcavasin’s assessment
1 Like
There is no legal issue or “game” advantage from using alt accounts on the main site. As so iNaturalist is able to avoid a formal blanket ban on having multiple (alt) accounts, but it’s not necessarily encouraged. If anything consider your own sanity with having to log into each one and keep up with notifications, stats, and uploads. However, if you use these alts for malicious use, like impersonation or ban evasion, those accounts will quite likely be shut down.
The forum on the other hand has a fixed equilibrium with one account per person, so it’s much more frowned upon here.
I got a notification about this topic because @spiphany cited my old post (thanks!). So, do I understand correctly that now the rules changed and I can create a second account and not have to be afraid that one or both of them will be banned? Since my post in 2022 I had many observations which I would happily upload into iNat if I had a second account.
I don’t know that the rules have changed; I think it is unclear exactly what the rules mean and it seems people have been interpreting them in different ways.
Perhaps staff could weigh in? I believe @tiwane was the one who had commented in the previous threads?
1 Like
In my thread, it was @cthawley
The rules around multiple accounts have not changed, and staff guidance still stands to the best of my knowledge. My quote from the original thread referenced (which quotes staff) is the same as I quoted in the thread this was split off of:
2 Likes
Disappointing, especially as apparently some well-meant uses of multiple accounts are justified and others not. And especially as there is constant need for more identifiers, and I would be more eager to identify eg. Unknowns if I didn’t have to deal with numerous notifications on my main page afterwards. But then, maybe I’m isolated with the need to separate flows of two kinds of notifications, and surely my input into identifying doesn’t mean as much in the overall amount of data to change this rule (or its interpretation).
2 Likes
You can use the Universal Metadata Tool to add IDs without following observations.
3 Likes
The stats or “game advantage” is the reason I would want to separate accounts, e.g. for family members’ photos or media evidence from automated recording devices. They’re not really “my observations” but they still represent encounters with nature and/or useful data.
eBird requires unmanned nocturnal flight call stations to be on separate accounts because otherwise their owners would be “cheating” in the rankings. For similar reasons eBird has an option for removing your account from the public rankings and requires group accounts to do so.
