Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: All
Description of need:
Currently, blocking prevents a blocked user from voting on the blocker’s annotations on any observation (not just the blocker’s own observations). This prevents the blocked user from interacting with a standard part of iNat, and is inconsistent with the application of blocking on other features of iNat (see below).
Feature request details:
I propose the removal of the blanket prevention of blocked users voting on the blocker’s annotations and restricting this feature to preventing the blocked user from interacting with annotations in any way on the blocker’s own annotations. I agree with the availability of the blocking feature in general, but I feel that this particular aspect “goes too far” in that it prevents legitimate iNat activity (voting on annotations) on observations that otherwise are not the blocker’s.
For instance, blocking currently prevents a blocked user from IDing or commenting on the blocker’s observations – good! However, blocking does not prevent a blocked user from adding an ID to another user’s observation that the blocker has previously IDed. Blocked users may add votes directly disagreeing with the blocker’s on 3rd party observations. I think most people would agree that preventing the blocked user from adding disagreeing IDs to 3rd party observations would go to far and prevent legitimate iNaturalist activity. Likewise, blocking does not prevent a blocked user from adding DQA votes to another user’s observation that a blocker has already voted on – this would partially break a core functionality of iNat.
Annotations, to me, are very analogous to this – they are standard fields for iNat observations that users can add information too – just because a blocker has added information to a 3rd party observation prior to the blocked user interacting with it, does not mean that the blocked user shouldn’t be able to interact with standard parts of the observation. The “balance of power” between blocker and blocked user in regards to annotations seems to be disproportionate here to the blocking functionality for IDs and DQAs – removing the functionality preventing annotation votes on observations that are not the blockers would make the blocking functionality more internally consistent.
A related functionality also illustrates why I think the annotation aspect of blocking is not ideal: Blocking does prevent a blocked user from changing an observation field that a blocker has added to an observation – I again think this existing functionality makes sense because observation fields are not standard on all observations, and are often used for personal projects. There’s a greater potential for abuse, and individual observation fields are user-created and not part of the core iNat functionality. Therefore it makes sense for blocking to prevent actions here.
On a side note, this aspect of blocking (preventing annotation votes) is not explicitly documented (that I could find). The closest I found in the relevant help article (https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000173516-what-are-muting-and-blocking-how-do-i-block-or-mute-another-account-) is
“Blocking someone prevents them from…otherwise interacting with you on iNaturalist”
If this aspect of blocking is retained (not what I am requesting!), I do think it should be explicitly documented at least. I also realize that this might be complex to implement. I don’t know how blocking works under the hood on iNat, and, if this would be complex to program, it might not be worth it, as issues with blocking and annotations are likely somewhat rare.