Considering the one account was last active/only active on the same day it was created and has no observations or IDs it is highly likely it is a sockpuppet account
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Agreed and agreed.
@kanescompendium appreciate your comment on that one observation. I didn’t want to jump the gun and was going to wait and see if additional similar seemingly-sockpuppet accounts popped up before flagging it, plus I was a bit concerned about creating a hubbub over a relatively small issue, but perhaps I’ll go ahead and flag it now.
Edit: scratch that, it seems like the account has already been suspended.
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My pleasure! Even in small numbers potential data skewing is worth the hubbub.
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Why do the DQA votes of a suspended user remain?
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In terms of data though, I think there’s a meaningful difference in terms of range between dandelions in a park in New Mexico, where perhaps with a particularly high rainy season, the dandelion could grow naturally, versus stuff in a greenhouse, aquarium, or in my dinner, where the organism cannot meaningfully move or reproduce on its own outside of a small contained human maintained area. It seems on my barnacle observation, the big disagreement is if the location is accurate–it is certainly accurate to where I encountered this organism, but at the same time, other people are right that without knowing where the oyster came from, the location I marked is not meaningfully useful in understanding the distribution of this species.
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Its been discussed before but theres no direct correlation with suspension and deleting or hiding an accounts activity.
From my understanding if an account is deleted (likely will happen to the sockpuppet after a week) its DQA votes will disappear but suspensions aren’t always indefinite so the original user’s votes would remain since their suspension could be temporary
Just to be clear, we don’t delete sockpuppet accounts. We delete the account’s public content but the account remains suspended and in the iNat database.
We don’t delete the original account’s content like DQA votes or photos unless it’s trolling, offensive, intentionally false, etc. Each person gets a vote made in good faith. They don’t get two.
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But if it’s a sockpuppet account, someone did get two votes.
Yes, and the sockpuppet’s public content will be removed. That includes votes.
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The DQA votes from the acct. being referenced to above are still standing.
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Yes, we generally give someone a week to appeal. I wrote that on the relevant flag, sorry I didn’t make it clear here.
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Just a reminder that
Because there were several posts with detailed links calling out another user’s behavior on iNaturalist, I have edited those posts to remove this text. In this case, the issue was handled correctly by flagging on iNaturalist itself.
Since the thread itself has deviated significantly from the original topic to discussing this specific situation on iNaturalist, I’m closing the thread.
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