I do like the thanks as it shows that there is some appreciation for what I do, but as other said without tagging please and not for every little ID… me doing hundreds IDs in a day it would get overwhelming fast.
I personally follow the follwing thanking routine on my own observations:
- Thanks when I tagged someone and the person replies.
- If it is an ID for something that was un-IDed for a very long time. In that case I am just genuinly happy that it was resolved at last :-)
- Thanks when someone went through a larger batch of my observations at once. I then usually pick one of those observations, where maybe anyways there was something else to clarify and use it also to thank for the many IDs… in this case I will obviously tag the person as well, because there was a question to be answered as well.
- If I have someone frequently IDing all of my taxon X over a larger amount of time I will also thank him/her at some point… maybe if the person leaves a message on one of those observations, I will reply to that with a thank you. Sometime I will also just write a short PM to let the person know that I value what they do… sometimes those were nice conversation starters. Sometimes there is also a chance to thank those IDers on forum posts or blog post in general :-)