Hi, recently some users and curators from Argentina commented about an account who uploaded more than 300 unknown observations.
When asked about this behaviour the user said that he or she uses this method for pinpointing locations while travelling and will upload photos back at home. Have you come across something like this? Should this user be warned or is this practice acceptable in the terms of use from the platform
For people making ID I understand that this could be annoying, lots of pages like this.
I agree that it’s strange and annoying, but I don’t think it violates any rules. It also doesn’t seem like a particularly bad practice if they do follow-up with photos.
I would probably just set my search to exclude observations without photos. If you’re specifically reviewing observations without photos, you could also exclude this particular user from your search.
This could be solved by the user deactivating automatic uploading/updating in the app settings, I believe. Then they would have the observations in their app for reference without clogging the ID queue. But I can definitely understand the idea to use empty placeholders while traveling, reconstructing locations after a trip with lots of observations can be a bit overwhelming.
I don’t really see an issue here at all. It doesn’t seem much different than how I use the platform while I’m on the move; I upload a single picture, hit the autosuggested ID without looking at it, then move on. Then, when I get home, I add the rest of the photos, properly ID, and annotate the original observations. The only difference is that they’re doing it for location while I do it to remember that I saw TWO butterflies, so all these butterfly pics get organized correctly.
For IDers dealing with this case in particular, I think that if you’re going through casual observations, you’re already prepared to deal with junk, anyway. I can’t think of anything someone would be doing where these observations are in the way, except maybe going through and IDing observations from this specific profile
well, maybe one observation it’s ok but having more than 300 unknown uploadings since june it’s different from my point of view but that’s why I came here.
I guess it’s very annoying editing that much observations having other ways to save geolocation in a photo but well, thousands of people will have different ways of using the platform
How exactly are you encountering these? They shouldn’t be showing up in the explore page or identify page by default. The one place I could imagine it being annoying is dashboard subscriptions, maybe it’d be nice if these didn’t show Casual observations/observations with media by default, or at least gave us the option to turn those off?
Some local curators on the site mentioned the situation, and when I went to the profile to take a look, I saw two different users leaving comments on these posts, so I understand that this didn’t go unnoticed, at least within the local Argentinian node. Perhaps for users of iNaturalist as a global platform it looks different, but locally we have greater control over what is uploaded to the platform for the Argentinian territory.
