I joined the forum a few months ago. If I remember currently, a user has to to earn enough trust before posting a topic. How is it that new users are able to create their own topics without much activity on the forum or even on iNaturalist itself? Isn’t this system meant to control an influx of new users on the forum?
And if the system doesn’t work that way, could it be adjusted to avoid the creation of so many homework questions?
This does seem a sensible solution.
I’ve been thinking about this as well.
Currently anyone can start a new topic, regardless of trust level, a choice I made mainly to allow anyone to post a bug report (and I didn’t know the various controls available for different categories). I’m pretty sure I can change it so all categories except Bug Reports require a higher trust level. I’ll explore that next week.
It disconcerts me that - anyone can find the ‘iNat’ forum. All these posts are public and searchable on Google.
Then anyone can join. Anyone.
What about asking “Is this part of your homework?”
I often ask colleagues at work “do you think this is X”? Is that “cheating”? There are at least 3000 plant taxa (not including weeds) in my area, I can’t know them all :(
I don’t understand why you are asking me that?
Cheat would be in an exam context, where your own knowledge is being tested.
At work with colleagues? How so?
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to reply or ask you specifically. Wrong button (apologies).
What I meant though is that there are heaps of plants in my area that I am not familiar with and I ask questions about them. How are people meant to know if I’m asking for homework or not (I’m not)?
Yeah, that’d be wrong
I guess we each look at the question that pops up, and decide whether to answer or not.
Lots of questions here start with a story. Why are my butterfly’s wings crumpled … Keep asking. I do too!
But a list of carefully worded questions, that looks like copypasta from a homework assignment? Not going to engage.
i’m not sure that preventing new folks from starting new topics will have the desired effect. i’ve seen both cases where students and spam accounts use existing threads to post their content. i would be even more annoyed if a lot of students started hijacking other perfectly good threads. i sort of think allowing folks to start new threads allows bad topics to be recognized and isolated (ex. unlisted) more easily.
i think preventing folks from starting new threads would more likely help address cases where folks post new topics that are very similar to existing threads, though the flip side of that is folks making big tangents on existing threads because they can’t start their own topics.
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if we’re looking for technological solutions to the problem, i wonder if Discourse has any existing bots or modules that they or third parties have built that could recognize certain patterns of behavior and automatically flag / isolate?
I worry if the knowledge here is continuously abused*, it could permanently degrade the credibility of the community in the eyes of those “uninitiated.”
I really don’t want to see iNat become the equivalent of Sparknotes (sorry for showing my age), in the eyes of professional educators.
it looks like the closest thing among Discourse’s own plugins is their toxicity detection tool, though it requires a Google Perspective API key (free?) and a Discourse Enterprise level plan. (not sure if this is already implemented in the forum or not.)
i couldn’t find anything that looks like it might detect school work, though i didn’t look very hard. if nothing exists, maybe that’s something some aspiring AI developer could work on as an interesting side project?
i’ve noticed that a lot (but not all) of the latest wave of school project questions have been getting unlisted. did staff / moderators already decide on some sort of process / criteria for deciding which topics to unlist and which ones to keep?
(if so, how are you all deciding when a particular topic crosses the line?)
moth pollinators also looks homework related
Two more:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-will-global-warming-affect-fish/35043
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-do-you-think-about-different-leaf-colors-in-the-same-area-of-same-altitude/35047
In the first one, someone actually created an account (sock puppet?) to reply to the question and get the conversation going, with some success. It seems a lot of effort just to get your homework done. Some of this might even cross the line into trolling. Perhaps iNat can look into IP addresses of the accounts posting these?
Sadly, there might be a need to make it harder for users without linked iNat accounts to create accounts here on the Forum.
i suspect that account wasn’t created merely to get the conversation going. it looks like this was probably just a classmate helping the conversation along. i expect that person will be posting his own topic soon.
most of these topics lately appear to come from one school. it looks like they’re trying to finish up an over-the-summer-break project. so expect a lot more of these to be posted up until school starts over there in a another week or so.
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on another note, some of these students may need to be taught that posting observations at their own houses will make it easy for any rando to track them.
Definitely getting a little annoying. It’s one thing if someone flat-out says “Hey, I’m working on a school project and it got me thinking about X” and they have many observations supporting a general interest in naturalism.
It’s another thing entirely when it’s wrapped up in something like a compliment sandwich (
sandwich), where they spin a story to make the question seem more legitimate.
Other than flagging and disengaging, maybe it’s time to rick roll and come up with bizarre, but plausible sounding answers, something along the lines of one sentence stories, where each new comment adds to it. Would definitely be less annoying…
I agree, these homework questions are getting annoying, especially when people actually answer them. I don’t blame the users who do that (maybe they haven’t noticed this is currently an issue) but maybe having some kind of advice or guidelines making forum users aware of the problem could help.
i’ve been tempted on more than one occasion to do some version of this (ex. Q: how will rising ocean temperatures affect fish? A: if temperatures get hot enough, there will be unlimited fish soup. yum!), but i think we’re supposed to try to push discussions to be more meaningful, rather than just troll. even with my (sometimes pointed) criticisms on some of these threads, i’m usually trying to point the students in the right direction with their inquiries.
i do agree that there should be transparency in these threads. some of these students say they’re working on an assignment, which i think is what all of them should be doing. some of them mention an assignment but don’t directly link their questions to that assignment, and they may even deflect or spin if pressed on the connection. some of them don’t mention the assignment at all.
if they’re going to be engaging folks in the forum merely as a short-term transaction to complete an assignment, they should be upfront with folks that that’s what they’re doing. to me, not offering that transparency is sometimes worse than posting the question in the first place.