I recently posted a thread in the “General” category. The main text of my post was about observations that are difficult to get from genus to species, and that I wanted advice as to how to increase the likelihood of getting to species, since I was interested in expanding my life list and not collecting lots of observations that just stay at genus. That seemed clearly to be a topic related to using iNaturalist. The replies also mostly stayed on that topic, as they mentioned things like a shortage of iNat users who know that taxon, asking the users who ID my observations whether photo ID is possible, and even a very helpful link about how to take identifiable photographs. All directly pertaining to using iNaturalist.
…and then it was suddenly moved to “Nature Talk” without any explanation. This confuses me, because I thought that “Nature Talk” was specifically for discussions not directly related to using iNaturalist. What happened?
I wasn’t involved in this action, but Nature Talk seems to be the best place for the type of post which asks about IDing a specific group to me. My reading of the initial post wouldn’t be that it is about a more general issue of
but about a specific genus of grasshoppers. The questions in the initial post refer to Melanoplus several times and the title includes a specific taxon. The final line is
The reviewers replies also address you specific observations.
That said, I’m sure that there are also some similar posts in General as well depending on when mods were active, how much time they had, etc. I don’t think that there’s anything negative about moving something to “Nature Talk”, and if there are any sorts of issue that are serious or where a response from a poster would be important, a mod would generally reach out personally or leave some sort of comment. I think this type of categorizing is just “general housekeeping” and a pretty normal part of the how the forum works.