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 not.
Edit: the problem I think we can all see is, once it’s known, it could quickly become overloaded with questions from hundreds of students!
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 community (? can that be called a community?) where you’ll immediately will face many downvotes and close-votes when you got some silly details in your question wrong - or the voter is just not capable of understanding the question.
So, I agree with @jnstuart that some “student questions” category might help us here.
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 questions. However an alternative category to keep it out of the main ones might work, so anyone who still has nostalgia for Yahoo! Answers can do their altruistic thing. I guess iNat will be hiring more moderators to keep up.
Both forum and main site moderators are volunteers.
IMO that goes beyond the scope of this forum. Its main purpose (and why iNat pays a monthly fee for it) is for discussion of iNaturalist related topics like bugs, feature requests, best practices, how-to questions, and situations that arise on iNat. The Nature Talk category actually wasn’t in the original beta version of the forum but was requested by users as a place for the community to discuss nature among other iNatters. I think that’s fine, but even then it creates more content, which is not directly related to iNat, that potentially requires moderation. Thankfully this community is great and not much moderation is needed, but I don’t think we need to expand the scope further.
There are other platforms like Reddit or Discord where, if anyone wants to, they could set up a nature Q+A section for students if that’s something they find fulfilling (and it totally can be!).
This is yet another reason to discourage homework questions.
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?)
I flagged … 
it hasn’t been shouty-obnoxious, but there have been at least a couple of cases lately where folks attempted to get novel code from forum members here for school assignments. i’ve become a little more hesitant to get myself involved in discussions involving code now that i know that people are doing this.
Tough crowd here. But can’t say I disagree with the idea that the forum should not be the go-to resource for quick answers for homework. Maybe an advisory should be made available to teachers and students alike that this is not what the forum is for, with a few helpful suggestions for other resources.
Added: Providing information for newbies who might be interested in nature but perhaps can’t yet find their way around the internet, or don’t understand how research works, seems consistent with iNat goals (rather than “you kids stay off my Forum!”).
Yes, the message should be kindly. Can you think of a way to say that gently and instructively?
Probably not. But it could be something like: “To Students and Teachers: Please note that the iNaturalist Forum is a place for users of iNaturalist to discuss various topics related to the iNaturalist website and nature in general. It is not an appropriate site for students to post questions related to homework assignments. We recommend that students use other web-based resources that can provide the information they need to complete their assignments. These include the iNaturalist website, which has substantial information on animals, plants, fungi, etc. A search on Google using the common or scientific names of the organisms of interest can also provide many websites with useful information. Thank you for your consideration.” .
I saw that one - even just a quick search on iNat a quick would have answered that question. It would be a different matter if they were looking for reliable sources of information.
Note that I am technically a “student”… I think.
This is sort of off topic, but shouldn’t there be a limit of observations/identifications and/or how long you have been on Inat to join the forum? Most users on the forum are in the top 1% of all observations or identifications.
I think that the Inat forum should stay related to Inat and other “cool” nature topics, and not for homework/schoolwork related topics. Theoretically, a student could make a new topic at the start of a test, and get an answer before the test ends.
I believe it’s irresponsible for the forum to give high schoolers answers, whether it’s for tests, homework, classwork, etc. I would recommend they look it up on Google or go on Quora or Reddit(almost anything you want to know can be found there). The Inat forum, in my opinion, is a “higher trust” forum.
It’s a free forum and not all users have iNat accounts, they shouldn’t feel excluded.
i didn’t want to believe this could be true, but it’s looking more and more like some version of this explains at least part of the latest wave of questions.
i think it’s hard to disagree with this if we define “answer” as a specific expected response to a particular question (ex. Q: are coyotes diurnal? A: no), but i think it gets murkier if we think of “answer” as a process for figuring things out (ex. Q: i want to test my hypothesis this way. do you see anything wrong with my approach before i go and do it? A: you should consider this and this, too.).
it could get murky in another way if the prompt is to simply start a discussion in the Forum, without necessarily trying to arrive at a particular “answer”. (should we deny folks the opportunity to learn how to ask good questions?)
i sort of agree, except to the extent that the students aren’t identifying themselves either upfront or at any point in the process and explaining what exactly they’re doing. (ethically, i think you should brief or at least debrief any third parties you involve in this kind of exercise.)
that said, i still tend to lean towards most of this kind of activity being inappropriate here simply because:
i’m not sure there’s one single policy action that will be effective at addressing all the different kinds of ways school work could show up on this forum. some cases are easier to detect than other cases. some cases deserve different consequences, i think.
i think there should be clear guidance to teachers that although it’s fine to introduce the concept of the forum and the community to their students, it’s not appropriate to require their students to interact in the forum in any way. but if the teachers don’t heed this guidance, i don’t know how you effectively detect and stop the students from doing whatever they end up doing on the forum.
Actually, I think providing answers to students on this forum could get the students into trouble. I am assuming, like all teachers, the students’ teachers may very well check to see if someone is taking answers directly off the Internet. If I were a science teacher and I thought that someone’s homework seemed suspicious, I might very well check something like INaturalist or I might Google to see if the answer shows up somewhere. So while the students think that they are getting ahead by asking questions in the forum, they may very well end up in honor situations. It’s never worth it. I check essay and literature sites all the time. I once had a kid lift lines from an Oxford scholar—big tip offs were the British spellings and sophisticated literary terminology. Just point students in the right direction to find their own answers.
Good point and it also brought to mind at least one post I remember seeing from graduate students asking forum members to complete a survey to help with their research/studies. A policy regarding ‘school/homework questions’ on the forum would need to provide a definition that takes that type of behavior into account as well.
Would situations like that involving the graduate school student survey be considered exempt as they’re ‘working on furthering scientific knowledge’ versus ‘filling in blanks on a worksheet’? Is the type of student less important than the type of school/homework question? i.e., No basic questions but survey type homework or self-directed acquisition of knowledge such as a home school student creating an experiment is acceptable? No policy is going to cover everything, of course, but that aspect might be something worth considering.