Automatically remove the profile bio spam mask after user makes a certain number of identifications

Feature Requests
1

Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: Website

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:

Description of need:
Describe the iNaturalist community need that your requested feature addresses. Include screenshots, URLs, and other details to help us all understand the issue.

Currently, if a user fills out information in their bio but they do not have at least a few Research Grade observations, that bio will be masked from public view for non-curators. When a curator sees one of these profiles, they can see the bio, and also this banner:

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The functionality then exists to ‘Flag as non-spammer’, which generates this pop-up:
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Clicking ok removes the spam mask and makes the user’s bio publicly visible.

Once a user uploads at least a few RG observations, however, the mask is automatically removed without curator intervention required.

This is a good feature, however, it has a serious flaw: it does not take into consideration identifications.

Feature request details:
In detail, describe the feature you are requesting. This includes its functionality, where the feature is implemented, and what it might look like. Screenshots or mock-ups are helpful. The idea is to have a concrete and actionable request which the community can discuss and vote on. It might change through discussion, but it’s much easier to iterate and talk about something specific.

Some users, including many experts, contribute to iNaturalist by only making identifications, with zero observations uploaded. Unless a curator happens to visit their profile, see the spam mask, read their legitimate-sounding bio, and then flag them as a non-spammer, these users will have their bio masked indefinitely for no legitimate reason. I always unmask these as I encounter them: earlier today I found a user who had 8,000 IDs, but their bio was still masked as they had 0 observations!

I’m requesting that once a user hits a defined ID threshold, the spam mask should get automatically removed, exactly as if they had made a few RG observations. What this threshold should be, I’m unsure, but I think it should be relatively low (50-100?).

2

I voted for this request. I think, though, that there should be a quality criterion for IDs similar to that of observations to meet the threshold, to prevent spam IDs from qualifying. Like, they should be improving or leading IDs on RG observations?

I realize some identifiers may be so specialized that no one else will be able to confirm their IDs. But maybe those are the cases that should still legitimately be reviewed by a Curator?

6 Likes
3

I like the idea, but then I would also love some kind of curator widget that takes me directly to these cases, rather than me having to accidentally stumble over them

8 Likes
6

Let a human scan the IDs, and click spam or OK.

1 Like
7

I would like this. I personally have very few observations but quite a few identifications. On iNat there definitely seems to be much more “observers” than “identifiers”, so I think me mostly identifying is more helpful to the community

6 Likes
8

I appreciate the problem - there are some fantastic expert identifiers here, who should be recognised as valuable contributors without having to jump through arbitrary hoops, even if “never uploading observations of their own” wasn’t something envisaged in the original imagining of inat.

But with my technical hat on, I fear the originally suggested solution bypasses the “proof of work” and “review by humans” requirements which are what makes this measure actually effective at keeping spammers from being a problem that takes up all of many curator’s time to catch and clean up after.

If all I have to do is click agree a couple of dozen times on obs of some unmistakable species, or suggest Goldfish for a bunch of old ignored Unknowns, regardless of what they really are - then that’s almost less work than just signing up for the profile, and could be easily scripted to create thousands of spam sockpuppet users in just a few seconds by a bot.

So I like this idea a lot more - if there is a tool for curators or people with a similar level of trust and privilege to search with constraints like “users whose accounts are over N days old with more than M identifications”, and easily review their work and ‘identify’ them - then fully recognising these people just becomes part of the ID backlog, it doesn’t need special case tuning to get the thresholds right, and it still has similar or better human oversight as we have with the requirement to get observations to RG.

There may be a significant backlog of these people to get through, but my first guess at how many of them newly arrive here each year would be that this isn’t a huge workload to add to the jobs that need a curator? If we remove the “only finding them by chance” problem, is that enough?

3 Likes
9

Yeah, definitely a problem I’d like to solve. I think I’d be OK with trying out some sort of base level like 50 observations identified, not use any other criterion like improving, leading, etc., and see how that works. If we see spammers trying to get around this by adding agreeing IDs, we could adjust.

4 Likes