I absolutely get that there are a ton of different possible ways to try and encourage users to enter location before checking CV suggestions, and they come with tradeoffs worth careful consideration and deliberation. That being said, I really wish we had some sort of bandage solution in the interim.
It’s been two and a half years since that reply was made. I absolutely get these things take time. iNaturalist is a very small team relative to the size of the platform they handle, I am not at all condemning them for not coming up with the perfect solution in that timeframe. However I do really wish they just did something to make this happen less, no matter how inelegant or flawed.
Anecdotally: there’s a genus of grass skippers called Lon. A few species look extremely similar, e.g. Lon melane, Lon poa, Lon vitellina, Lon chiapas. Fortunately only one of these occurs in California, Lon melane. However every now and then someone will report e.g. Lon vitellina here, always with the CV badge. Seeing as Lon vitellina shouldn’t be in the geomodel here, I am all but certain this happens because someone checks the CV suggestions before entering a location. On its own this wouldn’t be too much of an issue, but the problem is that when this happens the geomodel starts to expect this species nearby, and suggests it to others. Eventually this happens enough that even slightly more responsible observers will start to think their skipper might be L. vitellina, because there are so many pins nearby.
Even this wouldn’t be an issue if it was just happening with California grass skippers, but I’m pretty sure this is happening with thousands of taxa in hundreds of places. I can’t help but think this has created a fairly substantial amount of unnecessary work for identifiers, which I worry about when I see increasing numbers of posts about identifier burnout here. Every time a fix to this has been suggested, people rightfully point to drawbacks and why the suggested solution is flawed. I tend to agree. While I voted for this feature request I don’t think it’s a good solution in the long run. But I really don’t see how even implementing the hackiest slapdash fix for this would be worse than maintaining the status quo for years.