For example
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/user/richard000599
This is the latest iteration of the recent plague of online stream advertising projects.
After a certain number of projects get flagged, the user is tagged as a spammer and suspended then their projects do not appear on the projects page.
To find any outstanding ones requires going to their user page but the spam ones already done are not indicated in any way.
Are projects made by spam-flagged users visible to non-curators/staff, even if the project hasn’t individually been flagged as spam?
I am not a curator but I can still see the spam projects at: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/user/richard000599
When I click through to the user profile, the profile notes that the user has been suspended. Projects apparently live on post-suspension of the project admin.
In my experience yes. I’ve been flagging/suspending the account first. Until I also flag the projects, they stay visible when I refresh the tab where I am browsing recent projects. But as I flag the projects they disappear from that feed.
Since the project detail pages are no longer visible anyways, doesn’t sound like they need to be individually flagged as spam in the first place.
I think a better solution would be to also hide the user project list page (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/user/richard000599) and add a banner at the top there, on project detail pages, and any other pages, like there is for observation detail pages:
Looks like that banner does not appear automatically on observation detail pages unless individually flagged as spam, but those pages are already hidden from public view when the user is marked as spam. So that banner should also appear throughout when the user is flagged, so as to indicate to curators not to spend time individually flagging each observation/item of content as spam.
Is this the main reason individual projects from a spam account should be flagged as spam?
The ultimate reason is to make sure the spammy content is no longer visible, like potentially in the project lists of 28M+ observations, etc. If flagging the account as spam immediately hides all of their content including the projects, then that solves it for me. I wasn’t seeing those projects disappear immediately, but maybe that was because there was some kind of indexing lag in hiding the content related to the account. They definitely disappeared after I flagged the projects themselves, but not before. But if that is an unnecessary extra step after flagging the account, then that would be great to know for sure.
