Dear all, I have some concerns that too many users joint our project (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/flora-of-russia) in the last twelve hours (713 vs. 703). Ten new members, mainly from outside Russia is too much for us. Is there any official stats that sudden rising in the number of members in major projects is a usual situation in CNC days? Or may be a heat map of the links which are leading to our project page? I can’t explain this ascent. And I hope this is not a bot attack.
Thanks.
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it might be worth sending this to help@inaturalist.org, too. some of those new users do look questionable, though i don’t know what the normal process is for flagging and suspending spam accounts. i wonder what kind of advantage would be gained by a bad actor joining your project?
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Well, I think that joining several projects from the list of recommended ones could be a way of making false accounts look “normal”. Just an idea.
But I hope that new users with empty profiles are just new CNC participants.
May be someone from project managers detected similar things?
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Really nice to see your project. Just had a look at our comparable projects for India, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Turkey and nothing similar going on there. Hopefully your project just had some good publicity lately.
New CNC members could be joining through the app on the “Featured” or “Nearby” projects as they explore the app. Not sure how likely that is but just a thought.
For what it’s worth, spam accounts are dramatically down overall. I suspect they’re new users finding it from the featured projects page. I can remove it from being featured if you’d like.
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Well, Carrie, let’s wait for the end of the CNC to see the dynamics. We are quite happy to see our initiative among featured projects!
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