Chris Hillman said:
I too have noticed the recent spate of questions about homework problems (in fact I just spotted another one).
It's that time of year when students are either taking their first set of exams in college, or just getting back the results of those exams, and realizing they actually need to do homework well if they're going to pass their classes. It's typical to get a burst in the number of homework questions this time of year.
In the past, I have argued that the PF rules for behavior
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=5374 should be much easier to find. The response was "difficult due to technical limitations", but I'll raise the issue again in hopes that this time Greg or chroot will find some way to do this (e.g. a link at the top or bottom of every PF page to the behavioral rules, which should be page, not a thread). In the spirit of reciprocity, similar remarks hold for privacy policy, BTW, i.e. the behavioral rules that the maintainers of PF have promised to follow!
I'd love it to be more easily found too. For some reason, the last upgrade disabled the system we had that required everyone registering to view the rules and check a box agreeing to them before letting them post. It did the same for the forum-specific guidelines. I know it would save time for us mentors too if the rules were in a prominent location and everyone had them shoved in their face before making the first post, because we otherwise have to assume they probably didn't find them yet and do a lot more thread moving.
Another idea: a button like the report button which does this: posts a "canned" reply stating that the post violates a rule and saying where to find these rules.
Something like that is likely to be abused, but rest assured that when the mentors have to do something about a new member's post (i.e., move a homework post, delete inappropriate content, etc.), we do send a pointer to the guidelines.
I'd like to see both, but to deal with the people who don't read rules the second would be very handy.
Actually, most of the mentors already have a few canned responses saved as text files for just such occassions, and use them.
Perhaps the rule about homework should be added? So that all the rules are in one place?
The forum guidelines DO cover the homework rules too. The last revision of those guidelines was done with that in mind, to get more of the guidelines consolidated in one place. (We also closed a few "loopholes.")
There used to be a way for the admins to post an announcement that appeared as the first thread in every forum (when we had special "guests" for chat events, for example, these were announced across the whole site), so if that feature still exists, it might be a good way to broadly post the guidelines, or at least to announce that they've been revised so people know to take a gander at them and refresh their memory or check if the changes apply to them.
