Like other things beginning with the letter "s", spam happens. If you see something spammy, please flag it as spam. We also have an automated spam filter that flags content as spam. All content flagged as spam will be hidden from public view, and when a user makes three records on the site that get flagged as spam, they will be automatically suspended. When a user makes three observations that become research-grade, they will be whitelisted and nothing they create will be checked for spam. Curators can also manually mark people as spammers and non-spammers from the user profile pages.
This means that you have a lot of power in your spam flagging abilities, so don't misuse it. Our definition of spam is anything that is clearly intended to make money, which could be links to spurious sites, or by trying to manipulate search engine indexing through lots of links to weird places. Here are some things that are not spam:
- photos that violate copyright (there's a separate flag for that)
- offensive or inappropriate content created by someone who's clearly a legitimate iNat user
- anything that you arbitrarily dislike
If you have any hesitation, please contact a site curator or site admin, or submit a ticket.
If your content gets incorrectly flagged as spam or you are suspended for being a spammer, please contact us.
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