Ultimately unhelpful to OP but may be useful to others in the future… I think a practice some employ is to make an entirely new account for unfamiliar or equivocal taxa so they may have a “DEF CON 1” delete option. That is, one can dedicate an account to certain taxa, if need be delete the account(…

Sorry, what? Apart from the fact that I have no idea how creating and deleting an account would solve the problem of persistently misidentified taxa, it is explicitly against iNat’s policy for one user to create multiple accounts because of the potential for abuse.

That’s strange @spiphany , I sure didn’t come up with it myself, I have seen multiple instances of folks having separate accounts for ID purposes, even suggesting it in this forum (to no ire, as I remember). I guess someone better get on the abuse. If you have mass-misidentified a taxon, deleting yo…

[image] joegiulian: If you have mass-misidentified a taxon, deleting your IDs would reverse your impact. This really isnt focused on identifier misidentification, or atleast shouldnt be as it is not really the core issue that causes giant piles of misidentified observations to form. You cant …

Look, I offered what I saw as a tip others use that by my understanding fell within common practice. The OP asked for an example of how some have mass reversed IDs. Not here to debate its efficacy.

Ideas are always welcome. I’m not here to debate you. I am unsure though if this would cross the line of a guideline violation. I’ve never encounted any accounts set up like this. Maybe some other curators can comment.

[image] joegiulian: If you have mass-misidentified a taxon, deleting your IDs would reverse your impact. I literally noted this is a preventative that would require foresight, perhaps not solving OPs case, but would be a preventative measure for anyone fearing they’re applying an inadequate or s…

I am not attacking you. But I see no reason to pretend that a suggestion that makes no sense is anything other than a suggestion that makes no sense. If there is some perfectly obvious reasoning that I am missing you are welcome to provide it. Similarly if there is some place where staff have expl…

[image] joegiulian: I have seen multiple instances of folks having separate accounts for ID purposes strange that nobody else has seen this. iNat’s guidelines say a single account. Joe 1 and Joe 2 can agree with each other = RG. Not.

This community seems more or less a consortium of folks using secondary resources to identify. I didn’t say the line of logic was best practice, but I find that some people may choose the path because they may recognize they’re just asserting taxon concepts provided to them by secondary sources (whi…

Discussion about using secondary accounts for identifying (but not confirm your own IDs)

General

joegiulian August 27, 2025, 8:07pm 8

Illogical and implausible… gotcha. Let me know when we ready the pitchforks!

Topic		Replies	Views
Are multiple accounts permitted? General	15	462	December 8, 2025
Adding unnecessary identifications to unique observations? General	43	1361	January 6, 2025
How did about 50 species disappear from our project without notice? General	57	2688	November 21, 2022
People removing their identification? General question	17	1151	January 22, 2023
Deleted identifications General	30	3465	August 2, 2020

Discussion about using secondary accounts for identifying (but not confirm your own IDs)

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