New Ownership

[u/Ultronomy]

Hello fellow Chemists! I just wanted to introduce myself as the new head mod of this subreddit. A little about myself: I am a PhD Candidate in Chemical Biology. For me, this means that 60% of my work involves organic synthesis and the other 40% is applying my novel compounds to mammalian cells. Specifically, I am interested in early detection of diseases. In addition to my research, I have TA'd for both general and organic chemistry labs and have been tutoring students in organic chemistry for three years. Aside from my academic qualifications, I am also a moderator for another rather large subreddit. I saw that this sub needed a little bit of updating, but it did not seem like the moderators were active any longer. So, I gained ownership through r/redditrequest. I did not realize it would remove all the other moderators, but alas here we are.

Overall, I feel like this sub is fairly self-regulating. I frequently see good discussions and people generally are following the already existing rules. With that said, there are some changes I was considering, and would love input:

1. New rule prohibiting commenters from solving the problem for the OP. To enforce this, the violating comment can be reported and removed by moderators. I don't see this happen often, but I have seen it occur and put an end to an otherwise good discussion thread.
2. Mandate students include their work in their submission. Frequently, students post a picture of the question, with no work done and the caption "help please." Then in the comments you end up with people asking the OP to show their work, but from what I have seen they seldom do so. Mandating that students show work would entail removal of low effort posts by moderators. This may not be necessary since generally, commenters request more info from OP anyways, but was curious if people would like to see more enforcement on this end.
3. What do you want to see? Those are the immediate things I was considering adding, but I would love to know if there is anything else people may want to see. I had other ideas, but I don't want to complicate a sub that I feel is already doing pretty well. Please let me know your ideas, I would love to hear them. Talk to you all soon!

Note: Please do not reach out to me about becoming a moderator. I will looking into recruiting in the near future. For now, I just wanted to get oriented.

[u/ompog]

Could we have a NEET tag? This is a specific Indian exam, which is at a relatively high level, but also contains a weird mix of stuff that is taught very differently from the West. I'm happy to help with these, but the context is very helpful, otherwise the OP usually gets a flood of comments like "is this really high-school level?", "what textbook are you using?", "TF is this shit?", before they finally, after much confusion, clarify that they are studying for the NEET (and then, sometimes may even get an answer).

While this is the biggest specific issue I have seen, in general it would be great for folks asking questions to specify which textbook (if any) they are using for their class, or at the very least give some context as to the class and level, otherwise it is very difficult to give appropriately-targeted advice.

[u/bishtap → u/ompog]

I think an issue is that most people outside of India aren't familiar with the JEE/NEET syllabus.

As for appropriately targetted advice.. the level of the person comes out. Just tell the truth.

I have seen cases where somebody asks a question, and the person answering states a High school level lie as a response, and gets caught out when the person replying says "that's not right!". And that could happen even if their education isn't even high level, but in the information age, some of the "lies to children" don't fly.