Great, so any new P. rubicundus ID's will not be affected? or should I wait until all of them have swaped over before IDing the true P. rubicundus (will it take hours? days? how will I know?)?

lol... I think the atlasing did the opposite of what you were thinking it would do. All of the P. rubicundus from Australia got turned into Phallus ID's, and all of the ones outside of Australia got turned into P. rugulosus :P

@tonyrebelo I made a mistake, and I would like to reverse it, but I don't know how to do that without ultimately making it worse. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Is there anyone else you think would be able to help?

Part of the background was that this was a taxonomic issue; many authors have considered the two species to be a single species, P. rubicundus (thus the "confused" IDs), and others treat them as two separate species. So, I was trying to split P. rubicundus into its two parts, which is the purpose of the taxon split tool. I obviously did something wrong; I expected the taxon split to move most IDs of P. rubicundus to Phallus, except for those in Australia, which I thought it would move to P. rubicundus. Not having an atlas evidently has the opposite effect to the one I thought; instead of assuming a presence nowhere, it appears to default to assuming a presence everywhere. I think it would have been better to just have had neither atlased, in this case.

I don't have an exact number, but only a handful of observations are now incorrectly assigned to P. rugulosus. Among those are pretty much all of the African ones (less than 20 I believe), but those should be relatively easy to get back to rubicundus. Other than the African ones, there's maybe only 50 observations in the US that should definitely go back to P. rubicundus. As for Australia, there's also around 50 observations, but it's not clear to me whether they should be P. rubicundus, P. rugulosus, a different species, or a combination (I suspect but have no evidence that there's a couple of P. rugulosus + a new species). There's 1343 P. rugulosus observations right now, so that means that only roughly 70 out of 1343 observations (5.2%) should go back to rubicundus. Including the Australian ones, that would be 120/1343 (or >9%)

Personally I think that reversing the change would make things more confusing, so keeping the change makes the most sense to me. This change isn't as good as the one that James proposed, but it is petty much the one I originally suggested. I'll refrain from IDing them until a decision is made.

I think that the concensus is that reverting will be more of a problem than leaving it.

ok this has been reverted moving the discussion here https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/479865.