As someone who has actively added quite a few common names to iNaturalist, I feel like I may have decent insight here.
While I agree that this policy should and generally is maintained, I am not sure how strict it is suppose to be. I have seen this rule broken sparingly, including by site staff (an example with a certain species of pill louse comes to mind). But these were limited situations where a species lacked any established common name whereas its congeners all did, or a Taxon Split was committed on a highly recognizable species originally known under a single, well-known name (e.g. “Hercules Beetle”, “Raccoon Dog”, “Sea Pork”, “Common Cuttlefish”, or “Jack-o’-lantern Mushroom”) and to give none of the output taxa names would lead to a lot of mis-identification and confusion.
But these were not situations where a species with a legitimate preexisting common name like “Common Flesh Fly” for Sarcophaga carnaria had their names deleted or modified just because it made curatorial duties more difficult. There is a similar policy in place that addresses a situation like this.
Please don’t add information to a name in addition to the name itself, e.g. “grumblefoots (this genus is monotypic, just ID to species!).”
To redub this species’ default name as “Common European Flesh Fly” or remove it entirely is a modification made just for clarification and goes against this policy.
I completely agree. Names should not be removed or modified just to make identifications easier. It is not our place to police what other people call organisms.
Almost every observation initially attributed to the physically distinctive and nocturnal Octopus briareus is incorrect because the user saw it while they were visiting a Caribbean reef and this animal is called the “Caribbean Reef Octopus”. A potential soluton would be to re-dub it the “Caribbean Night Octopus”, but it is not my place to do so.