Are two accounts allowed? for the same person

I see. make sense

“never use one account to agree with your other accounts’ IDs”
That I would never do! nor did before

1 Like

That’s what I meant by the specific exception, that a user may post to two different accounts in a case where for example that they are employed on the staff at say a provincial park which has an account, and then also have a personal account. But that’s not really a person ‘having’ 2 accounts, it is posting to 2 different accounts.

4 Likes

So i needed to combine them together than?
If so, is there a way to transfer observations from one to another, and not manually one by one?

like a Exel file that can be download and then upload in the main user

If you have already created and are using 2 different accounts, the best option is to contact the site via help@inaturalist.org and ask them to merge them.

3 Likes

I will. thank you.

Yeah, please use only one account for your activity on iNat. Some exceptions are class accounts for instructors to use with students, and accounts for organizations (eg parks, etc). For the latter I highly recommend using an organization email account (eg info@organization.org) rather than a personal work account. There have been so many times when someone creates an organizational account using their personal work address, then leaves the organization, and no one can access it later.

7 Likes

I actually wondered the same thing. I only use my account for posting observations of reptiles and amphibians, which I’m really interested in and always do my best to find a species level ID myself. But sometimes I observe other animals and plants, which aren’t of special interest to me, but I’m curious to learn what they could be, so I have considered creating a 2nd account. Now that I know it’s not allowed I’m not going to do that, but I wonder what’s the reason? What’s wrong with having 2 accounts as long as you’re not misusing them to agree with your own IDs?

What’s wrong with uploading observations of plants and other animals on the account you have already? I originally got on iNaturalist exclusively for uploading bird photos, but having access to/submitting observations of other organisms on iNaturalist is what made me become a much more well rounded naturalist and sparked my now numerous other interests in the natural world.

13 Likes

Yes, I don’t really understand why people seem to have a problem with posting multiple types of organisms on the same account. I guess it could be an organization issue, sort of, but it doesn’t seem worth a second account or not posting the observations.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong about using one account for all observations, I guess it’s just a matter of personal preference. It could be due to my Asperger’s syndrome that I like things organized and I love it how my iNat account shows my herping stats :) So if a 2nd account is not allowed, I will have to stick to posting herps only.

2 Likes

You can still do this if you add non-herp observations, it’s just a tiny bit more complicated. You would have to go to the Explore page for your observations, click “Filters” in the upper right, and select the iconic taxa “Reptiles” and “Amphibians”. That will show you the same stats as you currently see, excluding any non-herp observations. You will have to reapply the filters every time you visit the page, which is a little annoying, but no big deal.

7 Likes

I can add one more case where multiple accounts would be useful. Some people could be personally identified by their travel pattern (even if they obscure their observations.) Spreading observations across more than one account is a way to provide further obfuscation without negatively impacting data quality. Reasons for wanting to do this could range from a simple wish for privacy all the way to safety concerns, e.g. for someone who has been stalked. I’d advocate for a system where multiple accounts are discouraged in general but allowed in those cases. In any case, wouldn’t a ban on them be unenforceable?

3 Likes

If a user chooses to obscure location for all their observations, and does not provide identifying detail through their profile or something similar, then in most cases it would in practice be really quite difficult to uncover their identity through the pattern of their observations. Obscured observations are adjusted to show a random location within the 0.2 x 0.2 degree square that includes the observation.

In general it’s going to be really hard to identify a person given the information that they were in various 500 km2 rectangles at particular times. I can imagine edge cases where someone wanted by an authoritarian government posts observations from a remote Siberian location during a time very few people are known to have been present. But those cases don’t seem like the kind of thing that should dictate general policy on multiple account usage.

Wikipedia bans “sock puppet” accounts in a similar way and the policy is generally pretty actively enforced.

1 Like

I respectfully disagree with your assertion about it almost always being difficult to identify people from obscured location information. For example, an academic’s unique sequence of cities lived in and visited, built up over years of moves between universities and travel to conferences, is practically a fingerprint for them. And stalking is unfortunately very common, so I don’t think this is as much of an edge case as you think it is. I would actually argue that having strong privacy options is crucial for equity/diversity, since women are so much more likely to be stalked.

I agree that the rule would be enforceable and should be enforced in cases of bad behavior, like agreeing with your other account’s IDs. But for someone who’s otherwise playing by the rules, I don’t know how it would ever even be noticed.

1 Like

There are the followers. I am not interested in all the stuff someone posts, and I guess other people feel the same way. This can be a good reason for wanting to keep the obs seperated into different accounts.
I have this private marine project in the Adriatic sea. If someone follows it by following me, I do not wish to bore them with gazillions of plant pics from Austria and Germany, or even discourage people from following me at all!
So, that’s my reason why I will keep my account to this specific marine project only. No alpine orchids.
Why not grant every user three different “interfaces” a priori (3 connected accounts that cannot interact with each other through commenting or IDing)? I’d have my profi german botanics account, my semi-pro adriatic marine account, and my layman account for chance obs of everything.

1 Like

You’re one person, so you should have one account only, from the organization point think how it would be if everone had an account for each taxon, how many there were, how would you be able to count people involved? You still can use filters and see all the stats you’re interested in, it’s two clicks. What you say means you hide valuable data from us, as major user you should understand how everything you observe matters and really, there’s no actual reason to not do that if you already upload herps! You already observe two different groups, like, mammals and birds can’t be excluded if you want to stick to one “group”.

2 Likes

As someone who follows many people, you shouldn’t think so bad about your followers, you can’t bore them by posting what you observe, that’s not the iNat approach. Not checking some orchids isn’t that hard, as following system on iNat is pretty easy to use when it notificates you about uploads. We don’t have account system because it’s not needed, if you don’t want to see what a person posts, then subscribe to taxon or place, or project.

3 Likes

i am mostly interested in plants so when I am doing ID and such for other people I just filter for plants. I could see the point of making a seperate designated account for a research project, especially if multiple people are involved, but i think over time you may want it merged anyway.

There are all kinds of privacy concerns with posting stuff on the Internet and iNat is a place you do need to worry about it due to timestamped location info. This is not about personal rules but I would rather see two accounts than someone obscuring all their data because they are only concerned about privacy of a few observations.

2 Likes

How about accounts of “trolls” ? There is a person with at least four accounts (In total they might have had over 50 accounts) At the moment they are inactive (No observations, no other activity). Should at least three of them be suspended ?

Is there a clickable link somewhere about privacy on iNat?

I often see obs with an actual street address - someone uses their cellphone and has location on. This pretty yellow flower grows in my garden at 142 Main Road, Wherever.
That info should be automagically obscured by iNat - as a default.

My own workaround is to use my suburb, centred on the Civic Centre. Near enough to make data useful. But absolutely not, I live, just here, hi.

2 Likes