Handling Top Identifier Status for Deceased iNatters

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@pattiedens

is there some way to prevent the names of deceased people showing up as Top Identifiers?

probably not, since there is no mechanism to record when a user is deceased. there was a feature request related to deceased users a while back, and i think this is relevant takeaway from that:

@tiwane

we’ve decided that it’s too difficult for us to verify that a deceased person is actually the owner of a specific account (in our records, we don’t have much more to go on than an email address and username), and thus we won’t be supporting a public-facing way to denote that a user has specifically passed away.

Rather than deceased, we will look into implementing a way to indicate that a user has not been active on iNat in a long time, or to easily see when they were last active

i don’t think a long-inactive indicator has been implemented yet, but the existing profile page does show the last day a person was active. so i think it’s a good idea to check that anyway before you message anyone with whom you haven’t already established a relationship.