Lately there have been questions posted on the forum from high school students, and some seem to be straight up copies of homework questions. I don’t want to call them out specifically - they’re kids and they’re learning (as we all are, really). As an educator in my past life, I don’t think the iNa…

My wife, the biology teacher, suggested maybe creating a new category on the forum for student questions, if there’s a desire to not shut out such inquiries completely. At least that way a forum user knows the nature of a posted question and who it’s coming from and can engage with the student or no…

As a software developer, I used to answer question on the CodeProject forum. But it turned to a place where students just shout “Gimme codez for my homeworx! Urgenz!” (likely all caps, and many more exclamation marks). So I gave that up. Looked for a while at StackOverflow. But that’s a toxic commu…

Agreed. We don’t want this place becoming another viper pit like StackOverflow, which is what could happen if you mix (apparently) lazy questions with an intelligent and often spikily hyper-academic readership. Expect bile, and not all of it will be unwarranted. My preference is to bin such questio…

[image] anon93074988: I guess iNat will be hiring more moderators to keep up. Both forum and main site moderators are volunteers.

[image] jnstuart: My wife, the biology teacher, suggested maybe creating a new category on the forum for student questions, if there’s a desire to not shut out such inquiries completely IMO that goes beyond the scope of this forum. Its main purpose (and why iNat pays a monthly fee for it) is …

All good points. Seems like students should be referred to iNaturalist itself rather than the forum where they can find much information and references to other sources on the taxon pages.

It may be a good idea, but with those students being so lazy that they outright lie they couldn’t find info that you can find in Google by spending a minute in search, do we need to encourage that behaviour?

I think the reasoning presented here to avoid having iNat Forum become a homework resource makes sense. ? So, do we flag such student question topics that appear to come from brand new forum users with few to zero observations? ? Or, should we use a nice copy/paste response? (If so, suggestion?)

School/Homework Questions on the Forum

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anon93074988 August 26, 2022, 6:44pm 30

This is yet another reason to discourage homework questions.

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School/Homework Questions on the Forum

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