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Merged RD Forum shutting down

@remirol: It's probably important to note that the "disproportionate" anger that you're referring to was produced by only 2 people. In other words, out of 80,000 members of the community that was treated like garbage, over 99.9% of them responded with reasoned comments and emails to Richard, or remained silent.

Find me any other group as large as that where only two people make outrageously negative comments (the result of which was met with a large effort by ex-mods and other interested members of the community rallying around sending PMs, creating stickied threads etc, asking people to stop with the over the top comments as they are not helping our cause). So these comments were not encouraged, and the members even stated in following posts (before Richard's silly "Outrage" announcement) that their comments were over the top and retracted them.

A similar situation would be a group of 80,000 volunteer workers who have just been told that not only is their help no longer required, but we're also going to knock down a couple of the wells you built and burn a few crop fields because you disagreed with our plans to change our venture. This resulted in all these volunteer workers trying to find somewhere to discuss the events and somewhere in the midst of some quiet little pub 2 people sat down and said, "Man, that dude was a bit of a douche".

Then the head honcho overhears this and says "What a vile crowd of volunteers we had! Who would dare call this fine gentleman a douche?!"

The point of that initial line of discussion, however, was to highlight the fact that the "vile insults" were not the cause of Josh shutting down the forum early as the comments were made days after the forum was shut down.
 
While this seems like a major catastrophe to the RDF regulars- and will certainly be seen as a major event by many posters on JREF, it is apt to seem very small beer indeed to the world at large.
I do wonder though, how RD's many opponents will handle it? Right now, some of his keenest supporters are in the huff with him, to say the least- some perhaps permanently disillusioned. Many outright angry. But there are people out there in the real world who already hate the man with a passion.
It seems he- or the "RDF" whatever the actual difference is- have just handed his opponents a major propaganda coup.

As a reader of his books for thirty plus years, I confess I am disappointed and surprised by the way this has been handled. While I agree with Remirol's points about the real world as opposed to the internet, I would have expected RD to have a better grasp of the likely effect of the letter to the mods, which seems to have been the critical dropped match that ignited the blaze. If he was involved in drafting that, then I can't understand what he was thinking.*

Maybe RD genuinely had no idea of the level of the mods' contribution. It's quite likely- but this is a man who introduced computer models to illustrate evolution in his books in the early 1980s. This is the man who conceived the "meme" concept, comparing biological replicators with information. He must be aware that net culture is not the same culture to be found amidst the dreaming spires of academe. Having associated with the likes of David Colquhoun who stresses the huge value of internet forums to the sceptical worldview, he has to have a better grasp of netiquette than most people his age.

It all seems most odd.

*ETA- Given that Josh Timonen, a sysadmin, unquestionably was involved in drafting it- and absolutely has to have understanding of net culture- I have to wonder if he was thinking at all.

I'd ask Darat, out of curiosity- what result would you anticipate if you (or perhaps Jeff) sent that to the mod team?
 
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Whilst I've seen a few newspapers articles that hadn't done their research writing about how "people are angry at the change in forum software", I haven't actually seen any of Dawkins' major opponents responding - however, I have actually seen some rather pleasant threads in heavily Christian forums popping up.

Most tend to be fairly sympathetic to the loss of such a large and pretty welcoming forum, and seemed to be in agreement that the change was a Bad Thing.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that this will change over the next week or two when the crazies come out to play..
 
Soapy Sam said:
As a reader of his books for thirty plus years, I confess I am disappointed and surprised by the way this has been handled. While I agree with Remirol's points about the real world as opposed to the internet, I would have expected RD to have a better grasp of the likely effect of the letter to the mods, which seems to have been the critical dropped match that ignited the blaze. If he was involved in drafting that, then I can't understand what he was thinking.
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I was about to correct you on the "thirty-plus years" until I realized I'm older than I thought I was. Damn. Anyway, I agree, and it's really quite disappointing to me. I've been a great fan of Dawkins for many years, and this seems at this stage to reveal feet of clay that I wasn't expecting. I was disappointed with the closing of the forums, but could accept that it was his site alone. But it has been handled with a tactlessness and lack of care that I actually find shocking. If Dawkins is fully aware of everything that's happened, let alone if he was aware of the original message sent to mods, then he is at best a bit of a tit. And that saddens me.
 
JihadJane said:
I think Dawkins also needs to get a sense of humor. The extended rat's bottom analogy is very funny and will hopefully end up chronicled alongside other famous insults such as:

"The prime minister clings to data the way a drunkard clings to lampposts. Not for illumination but to keep him standing up." Romano Prodi on Silvio Berlusconi

or

"He's nothing more than a well meaning baboon." General McCellan on Abraham Lincoln

or

"An empty suit that goes to funerals and plays golf." Ross Perot talking about Dan Quayle

or

"It's like being savaged by a dead sheep." Denis Healey on being attacked by Geoffrey Howe.
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This man is extremely hard to beat when it comes to vitriol. This man lived and breathed insults. Our recent esteemed PM none other than Paul Keating.

http://www.webcity.com.au/keating/
 
Prometheus said:
remirol, I'm curious, since you work in this area, what is your take on Josh's deleting the admin logs which showed which deletions were made, and when. Why would he find it necessary to do that? It seems suspicious to me, because I can't think of any reason he'd need to do that if not out of dishonesty or perhaps childish lashing out. Is there a more mundane/practical reason that I'm unaware of?
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There's really no useful reason. I delete my logs every so often, but I delete them with the Big Hammer -- ie. the whole thing, without regard to content. I do this mostly so it's a bit easier to review what's happened recently, as opposed to a couple months ago. As I understand it, the entries were carefully excised? Silly.

What's interesting are two other aspects. 1) The action wouldn't be useful to conceal the fact that some members previously existed and had been deleted; after all, one of the deleted accounts was a moderator. It can be safely assumed that people will remember him. 2) With the forum lockdown in effect, are those logs even accessible to anyone except Josh?

It really makes little sense even from a dishonest perspective, and that's one of the things that strikes me as odd about it all.
 
Mr.Samsa said:
@remirol: It's probably important to note that the "disproportionate" anger that you're referring to was produced by only 2 people.
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Statement not supported by the evidence. Even *I* have seen countless signatures and the like floating around various boards, many of which are, oh, how you say, a smidge over the top. And I'm really not following the situation anywhere but this thread.
 
remirol said:
There's really no useful reason. I delete my logs every so often, but I delete them with the Big Hammer -- ie. the whole thing, without regard to content. I do this mostly so it's a bit easier to review what's happened recently, as opposed to a couple months ago. As I understand it, the entries were carefully excised? Silly.

What's interesting are two other aspects. 1) The action wouldn't be useful to conceal the fact that some members previously existed and had been deleted; after all, one of the deleted accounts was a moderator. It can be safely assumed that people will remember him. 2) With the forum lockdown in effect, are those logs even accessible to anyone except Josh?

It really makes little sense even from a dishonest perspective, and that's one of the things that strikes me as odd about it all.
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Something occurred to me earlier today, however -- while this isn't related to a logs, it does come from a technical perspective. His action barring wget may not have been designed so much to prevent people from backing up their posts as to stop people simultaneously hoovering all the bandwidth at once *and* driving the server CPU into the ground with all the database requests. Eighteen billion posts (a rough estimate of the forum's contents, admittedly) all being grabbed in sequence can do that sort of thing.

I'm not Josh so I can't speak for sure about his motives, but if I saw either my bandwidth clog up or my CPU get run over, I would close and lock that particular avenue as well.
 
remirol said:
Something occurred to me earlier today, however -- while this isn't related to a logs, it does come from a technical perspective. His action barring wget may not have been designed so much to prevent people from backing up their posts as to stop people simultaneously hoovering all the bandwidth at once *and* driving the server CPU into the ground with all the database requests. Eighteen billion posts (a rough estimate of the forum's contents, admittedly) all being grabbed in sequence can do that sort of thing.

I'm not Josh so I can't speak for sure about his motives, but if I saw either my bandwidth clog up or my CPU get run over, I would close and lock that particular avenue as well.
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That makes sense. Too bad RDF didn't have the foresight to apologize in advance for shutting the forum, and include an offer to sell back up copies to any member who wanted one. They could have made a bundle for the foundation instead of stirring up all this animosity.
 
I just posted the following over at our new forums in response to someone saying that maybe Richard was getting a lot of flack about the tone of some posts on RDF (which I actually disagree with, but forget that)

It pretty much sums up how I feel at the moment, and why I'm so annoyed :

And yet there was no reason to behave like an utter lying prick (as someone at RDF certainly has)

If Richard had come on the board and said :

'Hello everyone, I'm taking a lot of flak for these forums, so I'm afraid I'm going to need to shut it down. We will assist you to transfer it to another domain under someone else's name if you can find a candidate to do that, and we will be starting a new discussion board with moderated submissions. Thanks for all your help, sorry it had to end like this'

Everyone would have shrugged and gone about their business.

All this lying to staff behind their backs, quote mining people, vandalizing peoples hard work on science related topics etc etc was pointless, unnecessary and childish.
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Well well well,

A forum member managed to get the thread about the changes out of their browser cache, and has now posted it online.

See for yourself the outrageous things the forum members said that required the early closing of said forum.
 
Yes, it may have been this, that, or the other thing how it was handled, but it sure is time to move on and get over it at this point. Sheesh!
 
Sledge said:
Question: what is this thread supposed to achieve?
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to see how this community reacts to the debacle over there?

which gives people from RDF an idea if they will like it here?


while I'm at it:

doing something you have the right to do =/= doing the right thing

this includes
* pulling the plug on a forum you "own"
* quote mining people and distorting the sequence of events to defend the disgraceful way in which you pulled the plug
 
Agular said:
Yes, it may have been this, that, or the other thing how it was handled, but it sure is time to move on and get over it at this point. Sheesh!
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As an atheist and a skeptic I am very attached to the ideas of honesty and evidence.

I think it is important that if we catch an extremely prominent atheist skeptic quote mining and lying, being dishonest and ignoring blatant evidence in order to try and present a warped view on events of any sort we should call them on it publicly and not sweep it under the carpet just because they are prominent.

It's about holding people to the standards they profess to adhere to, and ask others to follow.

If Randi was doing the same I imagine you would be calling him on it too.

For me it's gone beyond hurt feelings about a forum closing, it's become about Richar blatantly ignoring evidence and quote mining because it suits his interest.
 
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