Notify me when my observations are included in a new collection project

I wasn’t sure which Forum category to choose for this, since my post is about feature request and some general issues. Feature that I would like to suggest: notification when users observations are included in a new collection project. Why? When a collection project is created, observations are automatically included if they were made in the area covered by the project, an observer may never even know about the existence of such a project or that their OBs were included. Observers also cannot remove their observations from the project by themselves. So far, there have been no problems with this (to my knowledge). However, I recently learned about a project that I found deeply offensive and that included my OBs, too. I asked several other people listed in this project who, like me, were unaware of it. Almost all of the reactions were similar: they found the project either annoying or offensive. I flagged the project, but there was no reaction. Maybe there are reasons, but I wonder if the reaction would have been as complacent if, say, a British user had created a project called “Biodiversity of the British Empire”, a German user wanted to collect data for “Ornithofauna of the lands conquered by the Germans during World War II”, or a Japanese user created a project called “Manchukuo Plants”, etc. In short, I, and probably many others, ones not in the Forum too, would like to know where our names and data appear. I must admit, that the situation has considerably spoiled my long time enjoyment of using iNat.

I moved your request from #general to #feature-requests.

This isn’t possible because observations are never really “included” in a collection project. When a collection project page is loaded, iNaturalist searches for observations that meet its requirements and displays those observations. It’s basically a saved set of search filters.

Likewise, when an observation page is loaded, something similar happens - iNaturalist searches for observations joined by the observer, then searches those projects that the observation fits into and displays those projects.

There’s this feature request (looks like you’ve commented on it but haven’t actually voted for it at the top of the page): https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/restrict-your-observations-from-appearing-in-someone-elses-collection-project/18502

I voted now, thank you. But the problem still exists - how to know the OBs have been included in a project? If there is no such mechanism, then maybe there should be some warning for project creators about sensitive/problemic areas/names? Maybe one project has not opened a really big can of worms and it hurts only several not so big and significant countries, but this may happen to be a first swallow, so to say.

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Did you get no response to flagging that project for offensive ‘content’ ?
Your alternative examples do sound offensive, and not acceptable within iNat.

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Technically it’s just not possible to notify someone their observations are showing up in a collection project and that won’t change. So I’m going to close this request. Larger issues about project names and other potentially offensive content are outside the realm of this request.