We’ve suspended the Questagame accounts. It looks as if this has only been active a few hours and we’ve already received numerous complaints (e.g. this one)
Some background: Questagame (aka Andrew Robinson) implemented something similar to this (with IDs rather than comments) on Jul 5, 2018. Soon after he turned it on we asked him to turn it off in an email because:
Questagame is using a different taxonomy than iNaturalist
for example - I assume this is referring to Uca (sensu lato) whereas iNaturalist interprets Uca as sensu stricto
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/14278024there’s no channel of communication for the iNaturalist community to debate/discuss these identifications with real human beings
they are generating notifications for iNat community members subscribed to these obs that they are interpreting as spammy (since they don’t clearly come from an individual user) and we’ve received several complaints.
We asked Andrew to use observation fields rather than identifications to record Questagame associated metadata since they don’t incur these 3 impacts. To his credit, Andrew did do as we asked one year ago. However, today, Andrew turned on similar functionality using comments instead of identifications. Had he contacted us before implementing this, we would have asked him not to due to concerns (2) and (3) and, more generally, because iNaturalist’s terms of service forbid machine generated content. We’ve also had some other concerns with Questagame’s use of iNaturalist described here.