We’ve seen an uptick in forum posts by people who have written software that interacts with iNaturalist in one way or another. Some examples:
web apps that allow people to access certain data that aren’t readily available in the standard iNat user interface
browser extensions that add some sort of extra functionality when using iNat
quizzes or games that use iNat data
apps that allow people to log in to their iNat account and then post observations via third party apps
These kinds of posts have been part of the forum forever, and I think it’s important to have a place for people to share their work, get feedback, and discuss coding challenges and help each other out, as well as show what’s possible with iNat data and our open API. However, some posts are either clearly just promotional, or are in a gray area where it’s not clear if it’s something promotional gussied up with some feedback questions. I’m sure most people who make these posts are genuinely excited and interested to share their work, but it can also feel exploitative, whether that’s intended or not.
We on the mod team have been discussing how to deal with these posts and come up with specific guidelines or requirements for these posts, just to make sure they are genuine fodder for constructive discussion, and related to iNaturalist, which are bedrocks of the forum.
Any thoughts? Do you like these kinds of posts, or do you not care at all? What should a post like this contain to generate a constructive discussion and feel genuine?
Some ground rules for this discussion:
Let’s not turn this discussion in to one about AI/AI coding. This is about the forum.
Please be honest, but keep in mind that these posts are generally coming from people who are excited to share and discuss what they’ve worked on, so state your opinion in a civil manner
I would regret if these were curtailed in any way. The ones I’m aware of are genuinely useful.
I would like to see a lot fewer of these. If someone makes an app for whatever audience, that’s great, but it has no particular relevance for iNaturalist in general.
There are examples where this went really wrong in the past, so those should probably be sanctioned outright.
I think there should be some effort to describe how the app/extension is different from existing apps/extensions. I have found some very useful, but lately my impression is that a lot of them are reinventing existing apps/extensions. Maybe they are improvements, as I have not looked closely.
if someone wants to post in the Forum about something they made, i think the key is that the product should address an actual problem faced by iNaturalist users, preferably in a way that is better than what is already available.
if someone wants to get feedback about something they’re working on, i think the key is to be upfront about exactly what they’re doing. for me, i’m less concerned about whether something has a revenue stream than whether the person working on it is transparent about their intention to make a potentially commercial product and whether it addresses an actual problem. disclosing who is making a product (particularly when the person is not an active iNat user), what the product is supposed to do, and whether there will be a revenue stream (even if it is just to offset the cost of running the service) allows forum members to choose to engage as they see fit. (knowing that some folks have strong opinions about AI, it may also be helpful to disclose when significant contributions are made via AI.)
relatedly, if the intention is just to promote a product, we shouldn’t allow folks to ask for feedback when it is (or becomes) clear that there’s no intention to actually use any feedback they receive. that just wastes the time of folks who actually take the time to provide feedback.
when someone posts about a product that requires elevated permissions, i think moderators should be ready with some standard language that informs forum members about the dangers of, say, using browser extensions from untrusted sources or allowing third-party apps or websites to post or access private data on your behalf.
not exactly related, but i think it’s fine for folks to create lots of different web-based tools, but when it comes to things like browser extensions, i wish developers would combine efforts to make 1 extension that does 15 things rather than 15 different extensions.
I agree that many of the user-created extensions are very useful to folks, and I wouldn’t want to see them restricted as long as the posts about them meet some basic criteria (like going beyond just “hey I made this, what do you think?”)
The kinds of posts/products I want to see less of are standalone apps, quizzes, etc. that feel very tangential to iNat or just aren’t relevant (to me). The requests for feedback in many of these feel performative. We generally don’t allow people to promote surveys on the forum (even iNat related ones), so just asking for feedback about something isn’t enough to justify a post in my opinion. With the surveys, the main issue to me is that the posts are centered around a benefit for the researcher (or whoever made the survey) and not the community. I think there’s the same issue with many of the app posts - they aren’t really designed to serve the iNat community and are just asking for feedback to benefit the creator (or just in it for SEO).
With the user-created extensions, I feel like these are often created to meet a specific need of a user (who then shares with others who might also have that need) or in response to a community need that has revealed itself in forum discussions. That isn’t an easy criterion to evaluate in black-and-white, but it feel like the core of how I view the value of these types of posts.
There’s possibly a whole category of “computer stuff” that goes together that includes digital photo processing workflows as well as apps and websites.
I’m personally not fussed about either self-promotion or commercial interests, and I’d rather people openly self-promote than covertly self-promote. Maybe the right tags to label those posts with would let them stay? That’s kind of a contain-and-filter strategy.
There’s a “give you badges based on your observations” site that I’ve got bookmarked and go back to again and again, and I probably came upon it on the forums here (though I don’t remember). It also got me using the annotations much more consistently. So that’s a mere toy that feels like it stood the test of time for me and added value.
Is it this one? I know that I found it on the Forums, along with one of the Bingo card generators (which I find useful for suggestions on what to look for by month in different spots). They’re kind of silly toys, but the badge generator provides another way of building on my observation history, and I made the case for the Bingo card utility earlier.
So, yeah. Toys, but toys that add personal value.
For other things, I tend to approach them on an individual basis. There are some browser extensions that would probably be useful, but given the way Chrome sucks up memory on the MacBook, I haven’t installed any of them. Web-based ‘test your ID skills’ quizzes are fun, but not something that I couldn’t live without. Data access is something that I generally favor, but I’m not interested in providing free labor for commercial applications of said data.
I’m rambling, so I’ll stop now while there’s some chance of anything I type being helpful. (Or coherent.)
I used to be a fan of share-alike copyrights, but got in trouble with an image use situation where the case law is really quite untested. (There’s interactions with first-sale doctrine.) It’s lead to me feeling more permissive about commercial use of data, if only to not chill what seems like trivial or weak connections to money-making.
Personally I think anything that helps make iNaturalist easier and more efficient to use has to be a good thing… without a couple of extensions, I would probably have given up IDing long ago and I’m eternally grateful to their creators . The important thing for me is honesty and clarity, about both intention and potential commercial gain. If that is respected, I can’t see it’s a particular problem.
I fear introducing rules is unlikely to have much effect, anyone wanting to get round them will find a way. A possible solution could be to introduce a new section similar to the feature request section, with a template to be filled in by the creator when posting the extension (or similar) for the first time. That could provide some structure, make it easier for moderators to control and, on the plus side, help users find and assess new and interesting extensions, add-ons, websites etc.
I would insist on that. Do you, have you, used iNat ?? If people start from a forum discussion around a problem, then bring - I have this to solve the problem. Yes, thank you.
I draw huge benefit from the iNat Enhancement Suite - and use that constantly. And also appreciate that continued forum discussion has led to continued improvements.
The biggest thing that has bothered me about a few of the recent posts (though one was about a research project rather than an app) is precisely that they were written by people who clearly had no idea how iNat works and hadn’t taken the time to engage with it and find out, with the result that their ideas were patently unsuitable or unworkable. This tends to feel exploitative, as though iNat is merely a source of data to be mined. It also results in forum users having to explain things that they should have researched themselves before starting.
I would not, however like to see a situation where a policy of requiring people to be active iNat users before posting about apps leads to people adding a bunch of observations or other content merely to qualify. There may also be circumstances in which it would be preferable for them to post if this results in them getting feedback that encourages them to do something else, if the alternative would be that they plow ahead and create something that has negative effects for iNat.
Yes - there should be a blanket ban on advertising commercial products on the forum, no matter how relevant they may be to the iNaturalist community.
There are many products that could be of genuine interest to the community - just think of all the forum threads asking for advice about cameras and microscopes, for example. However, there are no special cases that are special enough to demand an exemption. Commercial interests should never be given free access to feedback from the iNaturalist community. If they want to reach out to potential customers, they can pay for their own research using channels other than this forum.
For strictly non-commercial interests, it seems a lot less clear what the requirements should be. If someone simply wants to make the community aware of an app they’ve created, how else should they do it if not via the forum?
Every thread on the forum is competing for mindshare to some extent. (Is there anything worse that posting a tumbleweed topic that gets no replies and hardly any views?) However, since readers can always mute any topics they’re not interested in, there’s a clear imbalance of power here.
There are many topics which aren’t promoting iNaturalist-based apps that could equally be described as “feeling expoitative” (aka click-bait). Do we really need yet another topic about green things, red things, transparent things, etc, etc. Personally, I immediately mute such bike-shedding topics, because they often draw a lot attention and are guaranteed to go nowhere. However, I certainly wouldn’t want to spoil the fun for anyone else, and I don’t see why non-commercial app-based threads should be treated any differently. I’m no more interested in badge collecting, quizzes, or bingo cards than I am threads about coloured things, square things, or whatever other flavour you can come up with. For all such cases, the mute button is going to remain my best friend forever. (TLDR; forget about strict guidelines - just let the community decide).
I’ve had the nature talk category muted since I can’t remember so I had no idea these existed. If in the future “hey look at my app” posts could be shunted there or to their own category, it would allow each user to decide whether or not to engage with them.
i’m not against this necessarily, but i just think there are many gray areas that could be hard to enforce. there are legitimately useful commercial products or things built on top of commercial products (ex. an iNaturalist plugin for Lightroom). there are things that are free but which people ask for a donation for support. there are things that are free for basic service but have a paid tier. in my mind, these are all somewhere on the spectrum of commercial.
for me, i think the greater sin is that the product is not of any legitimate interest to the community or competes directly with iNatuarlist.
my fear is that if we say someone can’t advertise their own product at all, then an unscrupulous actor will start creating fake discussions where one fake account asks about some fake need and then another fake account advertises the product as the solution to the fake need.
and then if there’s a blanket ban on any discussions of commercial products to prevent those sorts of fake discussions, then actual people could start getting censored if they legitimately recommend products. it’s a slippery slope…
I asked the community to help answer a question posed by my son with neurological difference because he finds it difficult to move on until his questions are answered, and I could not answer it and neither he nor I found answers after researching. Having not found any, I did not think there would be any, so I was surprised when it tumbled into quite a few.
I appreciate the mute ability for topics not of interest. Less appreciated: the high horses some are choosing.
More on topic to this thread: thank you for thoughtful consideration, iNat staff members. I wonder why being a registered user of iNat is not a requirement for posting on the Forum at all?
One other thing I think is important is more clearly identifying the tools/projects are not coming from iNaturalist staff, e.g. maybe we add the person’s username to the topic title. “iNaturalist Quiz”, “iNat Game”, “iNat etc” sound to me like iNat created it. I created the tag third-party-tools recently but that doesn’t feel sufficient on its own.
They don’t particularly interest me, but I think they can be useful to others, and our API is available for these kinds of uses.
That would likely be the cleanest approach.
It sort of is data to be mined (with caveats about licensing, etc), that’s why iNat’s an open data platform. I do find some posts exploitative of the forum’s energy and goodwill, though, which is personally my main concern.
For a few reasons:
someone may have questions about iNat but hasn’t made an account yet. I don’t think we want to totally exclude those people.
Discourse originally wouldn’t allow us to use third-party log in via iNat (the only way to ensure someone has an iNat account) for any network site until we made email confirmation mandatory on our end. So if you were logged in to biodiversity4all.org in your browser, for example, you couldn’t log in via your iNat account unless you also logged in to your iNat account at www.inaturalist.org. Since that’s now the case, we could ask them again, but I’m personally not into only requiring third party log in. If iNat is down, then you couldn’t make a forum account.
. The important thing for me is honesty and clarity, about both intention and potential commercial gain. If that is respected, I can’t see it’s a particular problem.