Hi INat community. I’m trying to find out if the INaturalist forum has individual fora for a specific geographic location. I live in Dalian, in Liaoning province, China, and I wondered if there is a way via INaturalist (or the INat forum) that I could contact all the people on INaturalist located in the area at once, rather than on an individual basis.
Thanks in advance,
Adam
Unless they are members of a project you manage and are subscribed the the journal notifications I don’t think there is a way of contacting all iNat users in a particular location all at once.
As an aside, by “fora” to you mean “forum” or 'flora?
If you’re looking for specific flora you an use the explore tab, designate your area via the selection tools or via the “place” function, then use the filters to look for specific families, genus, species, etc.
Or you can make a project for a specific area if your boundaries are different than those provided by iNat, and then do the same in terms of the filters.
It would be great if there was a forum for iNaturalists in southern Africa where they they can discuss their special issues or one for the whole of Africa.
My experience in forums elsewhere tells me the best way to approach this is just to start a single thread with a clear title. If that becomes too crowded and confusing, because of multiple different things being discsussed, you have a great case for a dedicated section.
Starting sections just because individual users feel it would be good to have them usually fails, so moderators are generally reluctant to do that.
(I’m not a moderator and not speaking for iNat, just sharing what I found elsewhere.)
Yes, this iNat forum doesn’t have particular sections for users based on their geographical location. Honestly, given the number of users on the forum, for a lot of places worldwide, I don’t think that there’d be a critical mass to make it worth it. I’d also worry a little about dividing folks up.
You can definitely make ongoing threads for questions around a specific region as suggested. There are also some language based tags (eg for Spanish), so you could create a tag and use that for a series of threads. There are also other iNat groups (like Discord) where something like that might work.
For trying to gather users of a similar place together on iNat, I would guess a project focused on that place/region as suggested by @earthknight would be best. You could try having journal posts, creating a community that way. I don’t personally know of projects like that, but maybe it’s been done before.
“fora” can be plural for “forum” – it’s a bit formal, and most people say “forums”, but I have heard “fora” before.
I agree that a project seems like the best fit here – I don’t think there are very many users from China active on the forums overall, let alone enough from a particular region, for there to be much discussion happening.
Do you have a local CNC project? That would be a good way to find local people. Both observers and identifiers.
If you are talking about the main iNat discord, unfortunately, that won’t work. It has been said that it is best to keep the server open to everyone and not secluded to geographic regions. If this were to happen a completely new server would need to be created for that area. From there it would need to be managed and grown. iNat does in fact have a lot of people from all over, but getting a large amount of people to a geographical Discord server is a large and tedious task. I’d had one for Florida with about 100 participants, but we had it closed.
iNaturalist doesn’t really have a mechanism to define where a person is located exactly. but even if it did, why are you trying to contact all the people in a given area?
The iNatForum isn’t a place for this, we’re not going to host or moderate discussion topics for specific projects or regions. You’ll have to make and maintain your own group. Various options would be something like a WeChat group, a Discord, or something like that.
This is exactly what I meant.
And the regional iNat pages don’t divide people up?