The party to celebrate iNat’s 18th birthday sounds like a lovely idea. I’m a little puzzled, though, by the relation between the premise and the stated procedure.
Think about your favorites. What’s a species that always makes you smile? One you’ve been hoping to find? Something weird and wonderful that most people walk right past? This is your chance to share it. The goal isn’t to rack up as many observations as possible — it’s to bring the species you genuinely love to iNaturalist’s birthday celebration. Think of each observation as a gift: make it one you’re proud of.
Yet the next bullet point says observations will be added automatically. Not all of the observations I expect to make on the day are likely to be worthy of highlighting. If it’s about “quality over quantity,” is there some unstated way for us to pick out our favourite?
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I love the spirit behind this birthday celebration! Thank you Alison for starting the project!
@kestrel, do you have any advice for Alan?
We fully realize that if you join the project, all your observations over those 4 days will end up in it! We want to emphasize sharing species over making as many observations as you can — we don’t want folks thinking that it’s the number of observations you make that we care about for this project. That emphasis is more for casual users who might go make observations because of the iNat bday project, not necessarily for folks who are going to be out making a bunch of iNat observations anyway because that’s a normal weekend for them (I’ll be making a whole bunch too, because that’s what I do on most weekends!). 
All observations are welcome, even ones that aren’t your favorite species, but the focus won’t be on the leaderboards.
Does that make sense?
Edit to add: we also wanted to avoid traditional projects since adding observations to a project is a hurdle, especially since it’s not a feature of the new app (yet)!
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Yes, that makes sense, thanks.