I’ve had two of my observations added to “Robber Flies of the United States”. I don’t mind at all, but I have questions.
Is this done by a bot or an actual person? If a person, I think it would be nice to know who it was. I had ID’ed my most recent one to species, but that person did not confirm or dispute my ID. I went to the project page to try to find someone to ask or to get someone to review my ID, but no curators or leaders or whatever are identified (just the usual top ID’ers, etc.). 1) Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to find out who added my observation? and/or 2) Wouldn’t it be nice for those who add outsiders’ observations to their projects to actually confirm or dispute any ID on observations they pick up?
Thanks!
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It’s a traditional project, so a person added it, don’t think a regular user can see who did it as it’s an open projet and everyone can add observations, not only moderators.
I can see it’s Asilidae, but can have no idea which genus or species it is, clearly if person didn’t add any id they can’t prove or disprove your id. Also I guess the point of the project to id observations in it when they’re checked by experts.
You can go to profile settings and change it so projects you’re not into won’t be able to add your observations to them.
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It’s possible they put your observation in that project so that they could look at it again later. Plenty of specialist identifiers will focus on relevant projects.
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I’ve been wondering about that group for a while (I’m a robber fly expert but haven’t joined the group yet). It seems to practically auto-add any observation that gets ID’d as an asilid within the USA, usually within just minutes. But it doesn’t do a great job at removing observations that end up getting taken out of Asilidae (e.g., there are still bombyliids, therevids, scathophagids, etc in there, and you can see that it has 1k more observations than a current search for Asilidae in the USA: 62,347 vs 61,484). So I don’t see how this project is better than a simple search, at least publicly (maybe there’s something about rights given to projects?) If you click on view all members you can see who the admin and managers are.
Anyway, I’m guessing you’re wondering about your Diogmites observation. It is a Diogmites, and D. neoternatus is a likely option from what I see. But that species right now is acting as a massive garbage bin of unverified Diogmites observations (postive feedback from the CV suggesting it) so I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for confirmation. Most Diogmites are very tricky to ID from pictures alone, and nobody has gotten around to wading into that particular mess to clean it up. We actually were debating how to triage this species just this week on a prominent robber fly user’s journal post.
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Robber Flies of the United States is a traditional project but it’s old enough that it still uses the “aggregator” (which we stopped supporting for new projects in 2018 but existing projects using it at that time are still able to use it). The aggregator currently runs once a day and it will add all relevant observations to the project.
So in this case it was likely a “bot” but for most traditional projects it will be a user who manually adds the observation to the project.
There’s no automatic process for this but a project’s admins/managers will see a “Find unsuitable observations” link on the project page and can use that to find observations which no longer meet the project’s requirements and remove them.
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Thank you! I was thinking that it looks like they need you, but I imagine you have plenty of other projects to keep you busy. 
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