I am unable to edit the taxon photos of almost any animal I view. I had edited many taxon photos prior.
Is there some limitation on how many taxon photos a user can edit?
You are a relatively new user with only 19 observations and 13 identifications. What kind of taxon photos were you editing previously?
Staff can lock taxon photos to prevent users from editing them, this is usually done in the event of an edit war or to prevent trolls / vandalism.
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An edit war?
That makes sense. I was changing the default photos of common and domesticated animals that are probably changed often.
I also waged war with a troll who was editing the eastern gray squirrel default photo as a distorted carcass.
What doesn’t make sense, though, is that some people are still able to edit the taxon photos of the species that I cannot edit.
Is that because the taxon photos are only locked to my editing because I am not posting new observations?
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We all fall into different groups, I think along these lines:
Staff
Site Administrators
Curators / Moderators (on the Forum)
Regular Users
New Users
So some people may be able to take actions others cannot based on the group to which they belong.
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I think it probably is. I am under the impression that they implemented some additional requirements in order to deter the trolls. It’s too bad that you were caught up in it–could you add some more identifications and observations? (I’m not sure what the new requirements are, maybe somebody knows, so you would know what your target is? They probably don’t have to be good or interesting observations…)
I was wondering about that.
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There is no limit to the number you can edit, what happened was that the staff responded to that troll you were dealing with by making it so new users cannot edit taxon photos. The criteria for editing taxon photos is that you have at least 50 verifiable observations and a confirmed email, as well as a certain account age, which has not been disclosed in order to prevent trolls from just waiting for the day they can edit taxon photos
I know this because I was communicating with staff about this change as it happened
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No, but we added some new requirements to make it more difficult for relatively new or unused accounts to edit taxon photos, due to the troll issues we had and because editing taxon photos are big changes - doing so can affect the site for hundreds or thousands of users. I recommend that you keep adding observations.
And to be honest, there are many other things you can do on iNat to help out, such as adding identifications or annotating observations, which will have a much bigger and broader long term positive effect on the community, I recommend focusing on those.
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