I recently was told by a prolific Inat observer to not add identifications to their observations, and they only want experts to identify their observations. I have never had any issues with this observer before, and they don’t have any “please don’t ID” anything on their profile. I always identify e…

I have had a few people ask me to not ID past a certain level for hard to ID species. I welcome that help. No one has asked me not to ID their observations. I doubt I would do it purely from a logistical perspective. When I do identifications one thing I rarely check is the user name. I check how ma…

I second this. I identify Chironomids globally. I dont have the memory to remember everybody from all around the world.

I’ve had someone block me to prevent me from IDing their observations, after getting defensive when I ID’ed their Unknowns (I was ID’ing all Unknowns in my area with broad, order-level IDs for the most part, not particularly paying attention to usernames). They got upset because they didn’t understa…

For some of my obs, I’m pretty sure there are a couple of ‘identifiers’ who simply wait til somebody else has said something and then copy it. Can’t do much about that, and it often doesn’t matter - some sp that is pretty common. But in one case, I’ve ‘commented’ something like “This one is for rese…

Sigmund Freud weighing in here to say the person wanting you not to ID their precious observations is clearly displaying anal retentive behavior. As others have said, we don’t own our observations and that isn’t the point of making them. If you want to feel proud of your production (iNat obs) post i…

I have been on all sides of this conflict. It is so helpful to read all these thoughts! There are some whose suggested IDs over the years have been left without any supporting notes and unsupported by the photos. Sometimes these can take a great deal of time and energy to sort out. I made particula…

Just want to say thank you for all your IDs on my plant observations, it means a lot. I’m also glad I’m not being singled out by the observer, sorry this is happening to you as well.

Oh, I just had the one interaction with them (not ID related) when they were under stress. The hundreds of others were absolutely smooth. Regards, Patti Tessler

Interesting. The moderation team appears to have changed their view on this issue.

Can someone tell me to not identify their observations?

General

cthawley July 24, 2025, 2:33pm 57

I’ve split off the above posts that discussed ideas around calculating confidence scores for IDs into their own topic here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/confidence-scores-for-ids/68018

Topic		Replies	Views
Blocked by a user inexplicably General	34	3913	July 5, 2020
Hiding a particular user's observations in Identify General	53	778	November 11, 2024
People making wrong suggestions General	126	7270	March 3, 2024
Users disrupting species identifications General question	48	3584	August 22, 2023
Remove ability for observers to agree with IDs on their own observations Feature Requests declined	80	1610	August 6, 2024

Can someone tell me to not identify their observations?

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