I sort of like this idea, but couldn’t a simpler version just be that the Community ID (apart from the opted-out user) is accessible via a filter? For opted-out observations, the CID is still calculated (we can click on the algorithm and see it). So I don’t think that there’s a need to calculate another ID?
Also, in response to
dgwdoesthings:
Now that there is a filter which filters out observations with private locations, which shares many of the same issues as opted out observations, I see no reason why an opt-out filter shouldn’t exist, especially since it is possible.
Staff (sadly) declined a feature request for such a filter, though I understand some of the reasoning.
After discussing this request, we decided to not move forward with it for a few reasons:
yes, it can seem fruitless to add IDs to these at times, but it’s actually helpful to get eyes and IDs on these observations so that if the observer’s ID is incorrect and they choose to not update it, the observation can be made casual grade by vote. This would remove it from searches, computer vision training, etc and be overall beneficial. One possible addition would be a graphic that shows how many more disagreeing IDs are needed to move the observation to casual grade, to make it more clear that the IDs are helpful.
the scale of opting-out is relatively small: as of this week, there are about 1.5 million observations where the observer has opted out of community ID, and less than 2k users have opted out of community ID by default.
and even though it’s at a small scale, we would need to reindex observations because we don’t currently store this attribute in the search index, meaning more processing.
I think work on a general exclusion filter for Identify would probably be a better use of time and resources. With something like that you could exclude a user (or taxon, or place, etc) from your Identify search for any reason.
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