I am frustrated by a user who daily dumps a hundred or more of duplicate observations into the general pool of butterflies and moths for others to identify. Multiple identifiers have asked him to stop, but to no end. I typically have no objection to helping ANYONE with an identification, but this poster is acting more like a spammer than a person genuinely curious about learning about what he is seeing. Is there a way to filter out this one user’s dump of photos so that my time is spent helping the community and learning from the experience of identifying others’ posts? He has posted over 16,000 photos of only 1,000+ species.
Yes, you can block them: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/some-updates-to-blocking-and-muting/39866
Update: I hadn’t used muting or blocking on iNat, but just tested and it seems that to remove someone’s observations from your Identification feed, you need to block, not just mute. I’ve changed the word above from “mute” to “block”.
Second update: I agree that this is not really what the block feature is for. If the mute function removed the observations from your Identify feed it would seem appropriate, as was my initial suggestion, but it doesn’t seem to work like that.
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You can add “¬_user_id=” to the url to filter out users.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-use-inaturalists-search-urls-wiki-part-2-of-2/18792
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I sympathize with the frustration here.
In general, iNat considers blocking a last resort measure, and this type of situation, while annoying, is not generally what blocking should be used for. iNat’s guidance around blocking is:
Blocking. Blocking is an extreme measure for situations where efforts to resolve differences through discussion have failed and the offending party refuses to stop contacting you. Blocking someone will prevent them from interacting with you on iNat, including through identifications and use of the Data Quality Assessment. You can block someone by editing your account settings and using the “Blocked Users” feature on the Relationships page. Each person only gets to block three people, and we strongly discourage using it to stop someone you don’t like or don’t trust from identifying your observations - you can address problems like that by opting out of the Community ID.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/community+guidelines
I think the suggestion from @joedziewa is a good one.
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Thank you for the input.
Thank you for the suggestion.
Thank you for the information.
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