One minor thing: I’ve had a few people over the years harass me off iNat due to our interaction on iNat (i.e., they look me up IRL and find my university faculty page, and then send demeaning emails or phone calls to my work). It’s not sockpuppetry because it’s off iNat, and I get that iNat can’t really police what happens off their servers, but I think it should warrant a more severe consequence than just blocking between us, which is what I see for harassment first offense.
This has long been a concern of mine, while it has never affected me in any serious way myself, the fact that off iNat stuff is not taken into account seems like a loophole for harassment. Off iNat activity is not separate from iNat when it is done as retaliation for on-iNat activity. If someone is going to engage in harmful off-iNat behavior towards me because of what I do on iNat, it could make it unsafe for me to continue my iNat activity, thus directly interfering with the site.
Now I do not want us to start applying the community guidelines to all off-iNat comments about iNat users, if someone wants to comment on some other social media that I am an idiot and terrible taxonomist, they should be able to, and we should not try to police that kind of off-iNat criticism or insult. The off iNat content I am concerned with here is stuff like wishing death on someone, suggesting physical violence against someone is justified, defamatory claims more serious than attacks on someone’s competence, or IRL harassment.
I have seen off-iNat online posts wishing death and suggesting violence is justified in response to both moderation issues and ID disagreements.
Blocking does not solve such cases, because the harasser may still become aware of your iNat activity, for example by seeing IDs you have made on other’s obs, and if they are responding to this with off-iNat activity that makes you unsafe, this limits what on-iNat activity you can do safely.
This comment should not be taken as a call for expanding blocking functionality, making it so that blocks make someone’s IDs invisible on 3rd party obs would be impractical and would limit the functionality of the site for users who have been blocked over no fault of their own (eg people blocked over ID disagreements, which does happen).
Harassment only applies to harassment on iNat. I totally understand the issues of off-iNat harassment (it’s happened to me a few times) but it’s often not something we can adjudicate. For example, if person A harasses person B on a Discord or on Instagram, iNat doesn’t really have any way to prove that Person A on Discord is Person A on iNaturalist. So, it’s limited to harassment on iNat itself, which I can make specify on the help page. This is not ideal, obviously, but I think it keeps curators’/staff’s ability to investigate and take action in a realistic place. So it’s definitely something we’ve taken into account, there just doesn’t seem to be a great solution for it. If someone has suggestions, though I’d be happy to entertain them.
If someone’s harassing you on another platform, I’d say it’s best to report it to that specific platform, or potentially to law enforcement if it’s serious.
IMO where blocking comes in here is that it’s your way to make it clear that you do not want to interact with this person and if they continue to try and interact with you, it will be clear to anyone investigating that they are trying to get around a block and that would be considered harassment.
iNat doesn’t really have any way to prove that Person A on Discord is Person A on iNaturalist.
This is generally true, and I think it is important not to suspend accounts based on speculation, but it is my understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) that there are exceptions to the fact that staff cannot know if off-iNat activity is the same person. The reason I believe this involves reference to specific incidents and will be sent to you in a message. (since specific incidents do not belong on the forum)
I’d say it’s best to report it to that specific platform
This is good when it works, but it is often impossible to report to a platform that you do not have an account on
If someone has suggestions, though I’d be happy to entertain them.
I think usually it is the right decision to base moderation decisions only on behavior that occurs on iNat, the only thing I would suggest is that staff are open to taking action on off-iNat content in cases where it is unusually serious and is somehow clear that they are the same person. Cases meeting these criteria will be very rare, but I think staff should be willing to consider such rare cases rather than having a blanket policy of ignoring all off iNat content in every case.
IMO where blocking comes in here is that it’s your way to make it clear that you do not want to interact with this person and if they continue to try and interact with you, it will be clear to anyone investigating that they are trying to get around a block and that would be considered harassment.
While I think it is clear that sockpuppetry and getting others to pester someone on your behalf would constitute harassment, I would hope that the rule on harassment is not applied in such a way as to prohibit every interaction with someone who blocked you.
For example if B blocks me, and then in the process of IDing I come across an obs by A, which B has IDed as Monomorium carbonarium with a comment about the propodeal proportions, I should be able to make a disagreeing ID and a comment that per Seifert (2025), propodeal proportions are no longer an identifying feature. (this did not actually happen, it was just the first example of an ID disagreement that popped into my head)
Prohibiting this would restrict IDers from IDing or explaining their reasoning, as well as punishing those who did not know, or forgot, that they were blocked by the other IDer.