Do projects just go on forever? Contribute to a Half-Earth Future, for example, appears to be dead, but it is still there. I understand if people have a short term research project, but then what happens? Is there no way to delete a project?
Projects can be edited, and one option in editing is to delete a project. It looks like only the Project Administrator can delete a project.
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Maybe helpfiles can help?
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/managing-projects with only two hits on delete, but nothing about deleting projects.
@bout ela
Yes, projects can exist “forever” but can be deleted by admins. Some projects have an end date (like for bioblitzes) but some are “perpetual”. If projects need to have observations manually added, and the admins are no longer active, the project won’t get any new observations, but still serves as a record.
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Projects are simply ways to collate certain observations. As @cthawley mentioned, some do have an end date, others don’t - it just depends on what the purpose of the project is.For example, I made a little collection project that just collates all observations annoated as gall: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/all-your-galls-are-belong-to-us So theoretically it has no end date, it’s just an easy way to see those observations and maybe encourage people to annotate their gall observations.
Others, like the City Nature Challenge projects (eg https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2023-san-francisco-bay-area) only collect observations with an observed-on date with in a certain range.
There are clear delete options on the edit page of each project, so it should be clear to the project owner that they can delete it.
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If projects need to have observations manually added, and the admins are no longer active, the project won’t get any new observations, but still serves as a record.
I’m a regular member in several traditional projects and can add other people’s observations as long as they haven’t opted out of that, so I think a traditional project could keep getting new observations as long as there was at least one active member. There just wouldn’t be anyone left who could do admin-specific activities
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Sorry I should have been more specific - I was referring to projects where only curators can add observations. Other projects do allow any user to add observations, so this would be unaffected by admins going inactive.
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If the creator of a project dies without adding anyone else as an administrator, can site admins add in anyone else, or is the project unable to be admined from then on?
This is relevant to me as it has happened in the case of several projects belonging to a group I’m a member of. Fortunately the creator added me as admin on the main project, but most of the others now have no-one who can make any changes to them ever.
I’m not sure, but I would guess it might depend on the specific situation. I think a couple of these have occurred before, but I would suggest emailing help@inaturalist.org and explain the situation with some detail so staff can evaluate.
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