I have encountered a situation where a user is only adding Computer Vision-Suggested identifications to observations of others, without any justification. Many of them are clearly wrong and have interfered with the community taxon.
I’ve tried contacting the user (multiple mentions in comments and a direct message) but have not heard any response. In my view, this behaviour doesn’t qualify as a suspendable offence; they are a new user and may not understand how identifying works. Still, I cannot find a way to prevent them from continuing to add these IDs. Any ideas what the best course of action is?
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How incorrect are the ID’s? Is it something on the species level? Or is it “Doormouse ID on a housefly” incorrect?
The ID that first caught my attention brought the community taxon back to class-level. Other than that, there is quite a bit of variation as to how ‘wrong’ the IDs are. A select few are only species-level disagreements, but the majority are disagreeing at the family-level or beyond.
Is it a child? Treating iNat as a game?
Hard to tell. I had a similar situation a month ago where a very young user was also adding incorrect Computer Vision IDs. But in this case, the IDs are much more numerous and broad-ranging – from mites to plants to lichen.
I would email Support about it - I’ve had to deal with a few similar users in the past, and generally a message from staff either spurs them to improve somewhat, or they blatantly ignore it and wind up getting suspended eventually.
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I would pass that on to help at iNat. We all have to start somewhere. To learn how to iNat. But if they don’t respond and leave a trail of conflicting IDs that is a mission to sort out.
Fair call. My usual course of action is to wait a week for users to respond before calling upon staff.
For what it’s worth, the Community Guidelines say that a user can be suspended for continuing activity that decreases the data quality of iNaturalist, if they’re not responsive. Especially if they’re doing it at a high rate. The reason I had that added was mostly as a way to use suspension as a final way of forcing a response from the user if they are not responding to anything from the community.
Add accurate content and take community feedback into account. Any account that adds content we believe decreases the accuracy of iNaturalist data may be suspended, particularly if that account behaves like a machine, e.g. adds a lot of content very quickly and does not respond to comments and messages.
So I mean, if the user isn’t responding to you after multiple attempts, they don’t necessarily need to be messaged by staff. As a curator you can suspend them. Make sure to message them before doing so.
FWIW, in this case Ben emailed us and I did message the user in question today. They only use the iOS app and thus don’t get notified in the app for new messages or comments on observations they don’t own. They should have gotten an email notification for the message you sent them, though.
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