Thank you for voicing your displeasure with the “Get thicker skin” comment. We really need that support and feel relieved. We are so grateful to you
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I’m glad it was helpful :)
To be clear here i am not speaking here about the discomfort of getting an ID wrong and getting corrected, or anything like that. I’m talking about things like targeted harassment, which are less common on iNat than many places of the internet but absolutely do still occur. In terms of the process of getting IDs and such, there is an aspect of ‘thick skin’ i suppose where some people really do not respond well to getting things wrong. I find this especially true in the ‘professional’ realm where people who are paid to do this work don’t like to look like they don’t know what they are doing and be shown up by an amateur. For sure i am not perfect about this either. But i don’t get the impression that it is the reason many people leave the site. I think it more stops them from joining in the first place. It’s scary to ‘put yourself out there’.
I do hope there are more options in the future for people leaving the site to leave some data here, like @tiwane is saying. I don’t plan to ever leave the site either, but others leaving can have an impact for sure.
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You said you are newer here. Welcome to the forum and to inat. We hope that you will find what you are looking for here. Did you know that you can click a user’s name and read their bio? Have you read ours? We really wish you would have read our bio before you posted your advice about our experience.
When we read your comment that maybe we should get a thicker skin, we were dismayed and angry. This does not meet our need to be seen or for choice or even understanding.
You said you can’t imagine going to therapy over an online insult. Could we ask that if you can’t imagine something, then please consider not giving advice about it? When you can’t imagine something, then offering vague advice is not likely to be fruitful or relevant and might even do additional harm, as is the case here.
Also, what do you imagine therapy is? Where else might one develop a thicker skin, which is to say emotional resilience, more effectively than in therapy?
Would you be willing to consider these suggestions and also to read our bio? If you would like to reply after that time, we would be open to hearing from you. If you do not want to interact further, we wish you well. Thank you.
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Our situation was that someone left a comment on an observation, unrelated to our ID, telling us that our pronouns (we/us) are not appropriate and telling us to use “I” as our pronouns.
This is not treatment we appreciate, and inat agreed to ask the user not to tell people what they are allowed to call themselves
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We attempted to send each of these last 3 or 4 posts as private messages to the users. They all posted on the thread instead, which is embarrassing and not what we intended. We regret taking over the thread. It was inadvertent. Oh well. We can’t figure out how to delete them. We keep getting messages that the draft is open in a different window. We don’t really regret anything we said. It’s just that we didn’t want to single people out like this or reveal this much of ourselves. Still, we hope we communicated clearly and with compassion, as is always our aim.
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these forums can be confusing. Not a problem.
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I am sorry you felt attacked for being yourself. I quite appreciate your input here on the forum (I don’t think I’ve run into you on iNat itself?) and I think you are a very thoughtful person.
Once, an observer jeered at me for labeling their Unknown as Fungi, as they wanted a more precise ID. I can certainly understand wanting a more precise ID, but I felt rather wounded by what they wrote. It put me off IDing fungi for a few days. A very minor issue, but I was surprised at how hurt I felt.
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I believe the only way to remove post content is to edit the post, delete the text and save it. However the original text can still be viewed by others by clicking the ‘edited’ icon that appears once saved.
In that sense, I do find it somewhat ironic that it is harder to remove content from this forum than it is from iNat itself 
EDIT: Oh there’s a bin icon. Thanks @jasonhernandez74
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One could make a case that those observations were not all that valuable – likely misidentified.
I can. In some ways, this can feel more real than critique by someone on the street, because it happens in the intimate setting of your home.
Now, I tend to be one of those thicker-skinned people, in the sense that I’m “game.” That is, if it looks like there might be a flame war about to start, I’ll wade right in and enjoy the fray. But even I am not immune; there are certain topics which leave me agitated and sleepless afterward; those are the topics in which I wade in, not because I enjoy the fray, but because of the need to protect my world from harm. That is, protecting my world requires refuting them at all costs, even if the effort exhausts me.
iNat is the only platform I know where that isn’t the norm. The one time I left a platform in the manner we are speaking of, it was because two of my favorite people there received temporary bans on the same day – for, I thought, simply being straightforward instead of beating around the bush.
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Click on the three-dots icon at the bottom of the post. One of the new icons that appears is a trash can. Click on that, and your post will be replaced with (Post deleted by author).
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People seem to be interpreting your question as asking about what happens to a user’s DQA votes after they delete their account–which is a valid question–but I think you were asking about the mechanics of another user’s vote persisting when the most specific ID has been deleted.
I submitted a feature request a couple years ago for the same issue, albeit with a different etiology (taxon swaps): https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/reset-can-the-community-taxon-still-be-confirmed-or-improved-after-taxon-swap/9266
@egordon88 @wildwestnature @teellbee
I made about half the work for developping this new software.
For simplicity, I plan:
- a “settings” text file containing the list of users whose observations you want to backup (there is no technical reason to limit the usage to your own observations only),
- a “database” text file per user, containing a full backup of all observations of the user, including the history of lost IDs and lost comments (whatever happens online, no data will be erased in this file),
- an “output” text file per user and per run, containing an easily readable list of IDs and comments that have been lost since the previous run of the software.
Usage:
- run the software from time to time,
- check if there are new “output” text files, if there is none it means that no IDs or comments got lost since the previous run, else open these files to get the links to the observations pages and all the recently losts IDs and comments,
- open the observations pages and submit manually IDs or comments for restoring, on behalf of you, important IDs or comments.
This shows how an observation is stored with its IDs and comments in a “database” file:
[
{
"ID": 143572698,
"CreatedAt": "2022-12-03T17:44:51+01:00",
"UserLogin": "jeanphilippeb",
"Identifications":
[
{
"Present": true,
"ID": 317998162,
"CreatedAt": "2022-12-03T17:44:51+01:00",
"UserLogin": "jeanphilippeb",
"Current": false,
"TaxonID": 342899,
"Rank": "species",
"Name": "Crematogaster scutellaris"
},
{
"Present": true,
"ID": 318021172,
"CreatedAt": "2022-12-03T19:45:55+01:00",
"UserLogin": "mettcollsuss",
"Current": true,
"TaxonID": 343253,
"Rank": "species",
"Name": "Crematogaster sordidula"
}
],
"Comments":
[
{
"Present": true,
"ID": 10933110,
"CreatedAt": "2022-12-03T19:57:29+01:00",
"UserLogin": "jeanphilippeb",
"Body": "Great! Thanks a lot!"
}
]
},
etc.
Present indicates if the ID or comment is still present, or has been deleted/lost.
Current indicates if the identifier has cancelled an ID without deleting it.
When running again the software, known IDs and comments that are now missing online will be marked as Present false and will be logged in an “output” text file.
When running again the sofware, IDs and comment already marked as deleted/losts will of course not be logged again.
Theoretical perspectives:
A single request to the iNat API is enough to get all the IDs and comments for 200 observations. We are allowed to make up to 10,000 requests per day. This means that you could back up (or update the backup of) up to 2,000,000 observations during a run (provided that it takes less than a day, because the token used for a run expires after 24 hours).
By batch processing all users (one different “settings” file per batch) that have a high number of observations, it would not be out of reach to make a complete backup of all the IDs and comments of all the observations of all these users (in order to contact them and help them after a disaster).
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Yes, it is what I meant.
Thank you for clarifying.
The lack of movement on this issue by the iNat team is one of the reasons I am less engaged with the site. The examples cited in this thread are just recent versions of something similar that I encountered initially in 2016:
https://groups.google.com/g/inaturalist/c/Lb8eMKl4QQU/m/qxLEOEj7BwAJ
Unfortunately, 6+ years later, a new cohort is dealing with the same challenges. The lost IDs are tragic. The problem will only grow in size.
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If you would like to see people’s profiles, the link is:
- https://www.inaturalist.org/people (modify for locale)
Only suggesting this in case you are using the android App, where I don’t think the profile shows up.
What if the user had withdrawn each ID instead? The IDs would (or would not) get replaced with other IDs.
We ask users to delete observations daily. We know there are taxa in which observations are mostly provided by a single user in some areas. Aren’t these issues status quo?
Agreed. Well said. And some of us have been victimized in the past by online “people” who later admitted to making up their life stories for personal gain of various types. Now I keep in mind that not everyone is as they present, even thought most are.
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They were very valuable, top observer of a region with then almost nobody observing, first observations of many species on iNat, likely unique spots of many (as any observer provides those). So, even if some were wrongly identified, we could do something with that eventually.
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Imagine people mot being the same like you and having different reactions? Ihope you realize how harmful your words are, it’s an adult person, clearly “growing skin” is not something that’s going to happen, it’s not a child meeting a critique for the first time. iNat is not a place for publishing and being tough.
Instead you can analyze what could push people into different modals of behaving.
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I could be wrong, but withdrawing leaves a record of the ID being taken away by the user whereas a user deleting an account makes it disappear entirely?