This is a rather weird thing and I still don’t know if it’s a bug or not - but I contacted the user in question (because I remotely know them) and they told me that this is definitely not on purpose and they don’t really know how that happened. Considering that the user is a relatively well known figure in a specific wildlife community, I will not provide specific links, unless an iNat person tells me to do so, just to make sure they are not needlessly bothered by this thing, in particular if it’s a known problem that somebody is already working on.
The thing is that they used to be near the top of the observer list when I took a specific class in “explore”, went to “observers” and sorted by “species” but now they are not present in the leaderboard at all (despite having comfortably enough observations). This made me look further and it turns out that most of their observations do not turn up in any searches, unless I put their ID into “person”. If I choose a small area where they have a lot of observations in “explore” and then go to “filters” and remove the filtering by their ID, the overall number of observations decreases since their observations are no longer there and they were so dominant in that area.
Even more weirdly, they have some observations that do turn up in searches - and then they have seemingly identical observations right next to those, of the same species, observed and uploaded on the same dates, which do not show up.
This makes me feel there may be some bug in the database - this singular occurrence in itself wouldn’t be that much of a bother (even though they are so prolific that fixing this could actually change species list for some sites a lot) , but what if we have a lot of observations that do not show up in any searches?
without knowing exactly what you’re describing, i would just suggest that you’re making sure you’re making the distinction between verifiable and non-verifiable observations.
there is one very prolific bird observer who records almost exclusively observations without photos. so none of those observations are consdered verifiable. if you search verifiable observations only, you won’t find the bulk of their observaitons.
Thanks for the idea, I checked, 99% of their observations are Verifiable (searching for all observations and then ticking “Verifiable” removes less than 1% of observations).
Update: the observations do show up on the map as points, that can be clicked, but nowhere else. In the extreme case if you make an area that contains just one of these observations, you get a result with “0 observations 0 species 0 observers”, but there is the observation on the map and you can click on it and see it.
I had a look at the account in question, and I think I found what the issue is - the user was flagged as a spammer on Oct 17, and although the flag was resolved and the account unsuspended the very next day, the observations have not properly re-indexed.
Although it has over 8k observations only 800 turn up in “identify” mode with the broadest search parameters… until I add “&spam=any” to the string, then they all appear.
I myself had the same issue a few years ago, here is my post: