Create "Legacy Account" setting

Feature Requests
12

While I, of course, agree that historical observations can be both interesting and valuable, I’m not in favor of legacy accounts (or other mechanisms that allow users to have >1 account outside of the already established situations).

Some of the reasons that legacy accounts could be problematic have been listed in many places on the forum, including a post I wrote on the thread that inspired this request:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/can-i-use-photos-taken-by-my-grandparents-or-other-deceased-estate/59535/45

I won’t repeat those aspects but will note some additional issues:

  1. Providing something like a legacy account would require an additional set of guidelines and complexity to moderate. At a minimum, the following questions would need to be answered (and then handled by curators):

  • What level of relation to a person would be needed to qualify for eligibility for this account? Relative, friend, random person?

  • What type of evidence is required (or not) for this relationship, and how is this assessed and/or enforced?

  • Is evidence of permission to post photos or sounds required, and, if so, how is it documented?

  • Would iNat’s licensing system need to be changed to accommodate these types of accounts, and, if so, how?

  • How many legacy accounts are allowed for a single user?

  1. I think these types of accounts would attract a lot of interest from some users who would upload large quantities of observations like this that would be a lot of work for curators/moderators to deal with. It’s likely that some users would be so interested in the historical aspects, that they’d enter their “best guesses” for location and date without accounting for uncertainty well, leading to inaccurate historical observations. iNat’s current system doesn’t really allow for observations with dates over a range of years and the mechanisms for correctly entering uncertain locations are obscure. This type of account would also be open to all sorts of other abuse (posting photos that aren’t one’s own or that one doesn’t have permission to post), all of which curators/moderators would need to handle.

  2. More specifically, if these accounts could add IDs or comment, they could cause serious issues with sockpuppetry or even well-meaning mistakes/double votes (user is logged into one account when they thought they were logged into another, etc) where 1 user appears to be >1. If these accounts are allowed, I think that they would need to be restricted to only interacting with their own observations - no other functionality at all. Dealing with sockpuppets and multiple accounts is already a serious problem that is very difficult for curators (and even staff) to handle, and this type of account has the potential to magnify the issue.

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