Users Uploading Photos of text as observations to bypass the automated failure on the Data Quality Assessment

General
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Sometimes a user doesn’t have a photograph or any audio evidence of an organism to add to an observation. If they upload the observation without any evidence it will automatically get branded as a casual observation regardless of if the user has written anything in the observation notes or not.

This has lead to some crafty users to begin writing text (that most probably belongs in the notes section) and then photographing the text and uploading that as the photograph within the observation. This seems to be done intentionally to bypass iNaturalist’s system, which prevents observations without photographs or audio from achieving research grade status.

I’d like to know what the official stance is on this behaviour? Is it allowed? Is it not allowed? I feel as though it should not be allowed, however I’d like some kind of clarification. In my mind these observations should fail the Data Quality Assessment as it shouldn’t matter if the notes are written in the notes section or in the observation photo section, however I still feel I should get some kind of clarification on this matter as I’ve encountered it a few times now.

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Under the DQA, could you click “no evidence of organism”? That moves it to casual, and written notes alone aren’t considered enough evidence for someone else to judge whether the observer actually saw what they thought they saw.

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Yes, best to vote “no” for evidence of organism. If it’s a pattern, please flag one or two observations so curators can take a look. This is not how iNat should be used.

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