if you’re asking me based on my past comments about obscuring to a place, i think that in a perfect world, it would be nice to have such a feature, as long as implemented in a reasonable way, but knowing what i know these days about the organization, and knowing more about how other users use the system, i don’t think it’s realistic to implement such a thing.
first, just to clarify, i think the best implementation would still require a user to put in an actual location first, and obscuring to a particular place would require first that the location actually fall within the place. (otherwise, the fallback would be to obscure the usual way.) this allows the borders of the place to be changed over time, without affecting the quality of the location data for observations that were obscured the the place. even if boundaries were reduced, and observations fell out of the place, you’d still have an accurate underlying location on these observations, and the observation would just fall back to the base obscuration instead of obscuring to the place. so the eBird-style hotspots aren’t really what i’m describing, and what i’m describing wouldn’t really address the topic of the original post.
now, let me tell you why none of what i described back in the day is ever going to be implemented. the most important reason is that the only places that you would want to allow to have this sort of obscuration are ones that you could verify that the place has people overseeing it. iNat simply doesn’t have the staff manpower to do this sort of review, and the labor required to do this sort of review doesn’t scale well either.
also, i think it’s important for people to understand that the existing obscuration functionality doesn’t fully protect underlying coordinates. back when i made those past comments, i still had hope that iNat staff could / would do something to address the problems with the obscuration functionality, but 7+ years later, they haven’t really addressed the issue. if they’re not going to or not able to address that issue, then there really is no hope that they will do anything related to obscuration, especially something as complicated as obscuring by place would be.
no. the point of iNaturalist isn’t really to obscure a bunch of observations one way or another. so you’re never going to convince someone to add functionality to help you do what you’re describing. if you want to do what you’re doing, i’m not going to stop you. i’ll even tell you how to do it properly:
- get the simplified boundaries of the place
- open that in a GIS program and put a bounding box around it.
- find a point that will fall in the boundary and an a radius that will fall in the bounding box that satisfies you, and create a pinned place in iNaturalist based on those.
- before you create your next observation for this place, strip any location metadata from your images before loading. then load those, and use your pinned place as your location when making your observation.
i don’t want to hear from anyone that this process is too complicated. the system wasn’t intended to be used this way, and if you’re going to use it in this way, then prepared to jump through some hoops.