I hope this isn’t a taboo topic, but it’s something that has made me a bit melancholy. A strange thing happened recently on iNat: like a lot of identifiers, I keep bookmarks of searches for the taxa I like to ID, and I noticed that some 400–500 tiger beetles suddenly popped up in my search as “needs…

I used to have two accounts when I first started Inat(I didn’t know that wasn’t allowed in the rules), and eventually got one of the accounts merged into my current account. Sure that account “vanished” and removed identifications that both me and my other account identified. The @ mentions are stil…

I suggest a separate option “Delete my online contents” only because otherwise iNat staff will refuse the possibility to delete an account without deleting the contents. Without this consideration, I would merely suggest no way at all for deleting all contents. My hope is that people will not use t…

I wouldn’t even make it this easy. If the user wants their content deleted, they should have to email iNat support to confirm it. Of course my preference is not to provide any such facility anyway - the ID, obs and comment data should be anonymised and retained.

[image] rcavasin: The folks that iNat needs the most are the folks who have the least need of iNat (or rather, the frustrations that go along with participating in iNat). Yup. The folks that iNat needs the most are the ones who know how to use field guides and to key things out, and have acce…

[image] jeanphilippeb: I suggest a separate option “Delete my online contents” only because otherwise iNat staff will refuse the possibility to delete an account without deleting the contents I do not know that to be true, but I do know that @tiwane said the following in this thread: [ima…

Not contradictory with the following (and consistent with a separation of actions): [image] Dealing with Account Deletion iNaturalist will always allow users to entirely delete their content from the site, both as a matter of principle and because laws like GDPR would not allows us retain data …

Right, yes, I understand that to be the favored well; I was merely pointing out his most recent statement, and that if one wanted the kernel of an idea one had proferred to be assessed for feasibility, one might do well to flesh it out more fully. That is all. Subsequent posts made it feel instead …

[image] jasonhernandez74: Yup. The folks that iNat needs the most are the ones who know how to use field guides and to key things out, and have access to those materials. And that knowledge and access, in itself, means that they have little need of iNat. I was actually thinking of professiona…

[image] lakekoshare: I was always under the impression that iNaturalist was a digital “museum collection” of observations and that these observations could not just disappear because someone wanted to erase themselves from the internet. iNat is a community that shares and discusses observatio…

[image] tiwane: confirming a deceased person owned a specific account So, maybe we should start when people are still alive to verify they’re who they say they are?

The vanishing of a fellow iNatter

General

jeanphilippeb January 8, 2023, 8:14am 273

Not contradictory with the following (and consistent with a separation of actions):

Topic		Replies	Views
Change account deletion functionality to allow account anonymisation and prevent deletion of IDs Feature Requests	139	4350	September 9, 2025
Dealing with Account Deletion General otherprivacy	81	17900	June 1, 2019
How did about 50 species disappear from our project without notice? General	57	2690	November 21, 2022
Deleting a post when incorrect about the ID General	47	1919	August 4, 2026
Observers deleting observations when identifiers disagree with them General	125	3729	October 27, 2024

The vanishing of a fellow iNatter

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