Suspended users can no longer be added to projects?

Platform (Website):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox) :

I’m not sure if this is a bug, or an intentional change, but it seems it is no longer possible to add users to a project if their account is currently suspended.

Edit a project > Under Observation Requirements, go to Include Users, and input the username of a suspended user - no dropdown appears and simply hitting “enter” does nothing.

Since a user’s observations remain active and eligible for research grade even if they are suspended, it doesn’t make sense to restrict them from being in projects.

(Probably related, the usernames of suspended users also no longer appear in the dropdown when searching the Flags page - however, in that case you can enter it manually and hit “enter” and the results will still appear.)

5 Likes

Can anyone confirm for me if this is indeed a bug, or an intended behavior?

I have a couple of accounts I want to add to a project, and I’d prefer not to unsuspend them just to add them and re-suspend, but if there’s no other way around it, I may have to.

does this sort of thing happen a lot? it seems like it wouldn’t be a great thing that any curator can unilaterally do this sort of thing.

has this ever been possible through the project edit screen?

it is possible to do this through the API, but i’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

1 Like

It was possible during last CNC.
When I’m working on copyright issues and there’s a cluster of users reposting each other’s photos a ton, I’ll add the usernames to a temporary project while I go through them.

Since many are posted with different/no IDs/locations, it’s really the only way to see all the copies together. It lets me see which one is the oldest original upload, and which ones I need to flag for copyright. Then when I’m done I just delete the project, or remove the users from it.

Not being able to do it has made it a LOT more cumbersome to try to moderate this year’s CNC, which is unfortunate, since there is a lot more observation falsification this year than ever before.

3 Likes

I think this situation is a good, creative use of projects that should be supported with this functionality, though it certainly is niche. I don’t know how the ability to add suspended users to projects could be abused (but there might be some use case I am not thinking of). I think it’s reasonable to unsuspend/resuspend in this case to enable adding to a project and would just describe why it was done in the notes. If done within a minute or something, I don’t think this would cause any confusion.

1 Like

what about using a URL with their usernames? https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/search+urls#observers

D’you happen to know if there’s an upper limit on how many usernames you can have in a URL at once? I’ll give it a shot, but sometimes there’s 60 or 70 accounts, so it may get a bit unwieldy.

1 Like

no I’m not sure if there is an upper limit or not

but that really needs to be a tool offered by iNat.

I suspect it’s probably unintentional, but I think it should be fixed. I made a github issue for it: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/4563

2 Likes