I have occasionally come across users who seem to go on ‘agree’ sprees on observations in my account and in projects I’m part of. Sometimes, this happens on observations where the uploader’s ID suggestion is meant to be a mere placeholder at best, waiting for expert inputs.
Upon checking out such users’ profiles, it seems obvious that they’re doing this to rack up a huge ‘identifications’ count… presumably without actually knowing IDs well enough to agree, because they’re RG’ing observations across a huge spectrum of taxa.
The only way to tackle this within iNat currently (I presume) is to request them via private message to refrain from doing this. However, some don’t listen. This poses a serious problem to projects that have a definite objective. For example, I’m part of projects whose RG records are being used in legal proceedings to protect threatened habitats, and any compromise of data quality seriously undermines the work we do. Needless to say, the problem isn’t restricted to this - it would get carried forward to anyone and anything that uses GBIF datasets.
How does one go about solving this problem? Should I be thinking of this as some kind of feature request? For consistent defaulters, I would think of something like a ‘block’ or ‘report’ option, but I guess that’s not in the spirit of iNat! :)
Is there an existing way to go about this that I haven’t seen?