Long standing issues with user

This is actually about the same user which made me create this thread about devaluing observations. While, thankfully, they no longer do this so much. Recently what they did made me question everything again and I’m not certain how to proceed.

I caught them out making audio observations recording the sound clip from the eBird page for said bird. It was very obvious basing it upon the quality of sound/photos they usually make, as well as it being a match with the background bird sounds from the featured audio clip. Since making a comment and reporting they deleted it all. It was also because they bird was rather rare, likely not singing in the observed location and it being well beyond the apparent skill level to record such audio.

It’s worrying because I didn’t document it and they have plenty of observations which they may have done this before. It would be incredibly fortunate if I had just caught them out as soon as they tried to make fraudulent audio observations…

Their behaviour in the past nearly got them banned, after I followed up to support but now it arguable took a worse turn than simply agreeing to wrong IDs. Thoughts?

The best solution would probably be to check through the observations in question, and, if there is a continuing pattern of creating false observations to describe/document this in a message to staff/help@inaturalist.org. Staff can see some info about deleted observations.

Because this is a question strongly focused on past and potentially current poor behavior by a specific user (who isn’t specifically named/linked, which I appreciate), I’m going to close the thread as the forum really isn’t intended to discuss specific situations of misuse of iNat.

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Hi @hamsambly, in addition to what @cthawley said, please flag any suspect observations like that in the future because the flag itself will persist even if the observation is deleted.

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