I bet it’s because people were appending “complex” and “group” to the scientific names for species complexes for a while (e.g., Complex Condylostylus sipho group), before iNat adopted an official style recommendation. Now you aren’t supposed to add any extra words, and maybe this is a way to try to curb that behavior automatically.
I support stripping ranks from taxon names in general, but it might be nice if there could be a message like “parts of this name were stripped automatically, if this was in error, please contact help@inat”.
At any rate, it’s definitely not an issue that curators can fix.
I don’t think this counts as a bug because I think this is iNat working as intended, rather an unforeseen consequence. Let me know if I should put this elsewhere.
I’ve run into an issue, one of the subspecies Sceliphron fossuliferum complex cannot be properly saved as it deletes ‘complex’ from the name and saves it as Sceliphron ssp. fossuliferum.
I assume this is to prevent anyone from putting complex in the name of a complex but in this case the subspecies’ name is complex.
Is there a way to fix this or do staff need to edit/add the name?
Welcome to the forum! I moved your post to this existing bug report. There is no way for a curator to fix this, but perhaps someone on staff will help out.
There’s a similar issue to this one: the web site Upload page (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/upload) strips the word “complex” from photo tags that include the word “complex”, such as Oedipina complex or Complex Fan-foot. This leads to a new observation receiving an incorrect initial ID, in similar fashion to how a new taxon containing “complex” becomes mis-entered.
Given that the issue is with people typing ‘complex’ into the name field when they shouldn’t I don’t think this is a solution. Perhaps just have a pop up with an explanation and an option to continue or not?