tsig
a carbon based life-form
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2005
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Well there was a little weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Merged RD Forum shutting down
- Thread starter tsig
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Well there was a little weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Not necessarily. It's reasonably likely that his emails pass through other hands.
Respectfully,
Myriad
This is really bizarre and ham-handed behavior.
Yes, they have the right to do it. But it's a dumb way to behave if you're trying to build a community. And threatening to punish people for merely expressing their views to Dawkins, no matter how politely they do so, is not exactly consistent with promoting critical thinking. Email your MP to complain about faith schools or paying for a papal visit, but don't email Dawkins to complain about his website!
Yes, they have the right to do it. But it's a dumb way to behave if you're trying to build a community. And threatening to punish people for merely expressing their views to Dawkins, no matter how politely they do so, is not exactly consistent with promoting critical thinking. Email your MP to complain about faith schools or paying for a papal visit, but don't email Dawkins to complain about his website!
cj.23
Master Poster
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2006
- Messages
- 2,827
Yes of course, good point -- the same people responsible for the botchd handling of the whole matter, and people who really might not want RD to hear the anguished howls of protest
cj x
Well, I must apologise, I signed up for RDF yesterday, and it was clearly the straw that broke the camel's back. Didn't even get a chance to post.
I can still sign in there, but everything is read-only, and there's nothing on the forum overview page announcing what's happened. You have to go into a forum to see the Announcement at the top, which has now been updated with this:
I can still sign in there, but everything is read-only, and there's nothing on the forum overview page announcing what's happened. You have to go into a forum to see the Announcement at the top, which has now been updated with this:
shadron
Philosopher
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2005
- Messages
- 5,918
I would think that if they wanted to make major changes a smarter way to go about it would be to seek consensus over an extended period of time. For a forum, the size of the readership is the one statistic which means anything. Dawkin's name is a draw, but the community is based on its size and its quality, nothing more. The moves here would seem to be an attack on both, and I'll be surprised if that forum is ever reckoned to be as great as it was last week ever again. The damage is done. If they reverted back tomorrow, they'd have still lost.
shadron
Philosopher
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2005
- Messages
- 5,918
Personally, if I were RD I would be royally pissed off if someone was taking concrete action on the basis of emails addressed to me that they were intercepting, unless I'd have agreed to it beforehand.
The oddest thing about this is the apparent attempt (however inept or halfhearted) to keep people from leaving. "We're closing the bar, turning off the music, and turning out the lights, but please sit tight and don't discuss going anywhere else."
Complete apathy, I can understand (though of course I don't agree). The unfortunate reality is that people who are not involved in a online community generally do not value that online community. Not its existence, nor its output. What a thousand members might see as tens of thousands of brilliant insightful posts can seem, to an eager junior executive with Big Plans, as about as valuable as a basement full of old newspapers. (Just as in previous times and places, five thousand residents' vibrant neighborhood could be seen through the distorted lens of a freeway planner as a blighted slum badly in need of "urban renewal".) The results, as in this case, are heartbreaking to read about.
But the "don't talk about leaving" oddness doesn't mesh with that. You can lock people out of an Internet forum, but trying to lock them in is more than a little foolish.
Respectfully,
Myriad
Complete apathy, I can understand (though of course I don't agree). The unfortunate reality is that people who are not involved in a online community generally do not value that online community. Not its existence, nor its output. What a thousand members might see as tens of thousands of brilliant insightful posts can seem, to an eager junior executive with Big Plans, as about as valuable as a basement full of old newspapers. (Just as in previous times and places, five thousand residents' vibrant neighborhood could be seen through the distorted lens of a freeway planner as a blighted slum badly in need of "urban renewal".) The results, as in this case, are heartbreaking to read about.
But the "don't talk about leaving" oddness doesn't mesh with that. You can lock people out of an Internet forum, but trying to lock them in is more than a little foolish.
Respectfully,
Myriad
cj.23
Master Poster
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- Dec 17, 2006
- Messages
- 2,827
AH! So it was YOUR fault Zooterkin. I was egotistically wondering if RD had just gone apoplectic when a Christian (me) won the RD.net Science Writing Contest with my essay "Damning Darwin" - http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2010/...ils-of-myth-making-in-the-history-of-science/
cj x
macdoc
Philosopher
Pretty wild over at rationalia
It's at Part two already which means over a thousand posts ...
http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=75&t=9007
that was started yesterday!!!
http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=75&t=8864
sample
some pretty pissed off people...talk about kicking apart a hornets nest.....
It's at Part two already which means over a thousand posts ...
http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=75&t=9007
that was started yesterday!!!
http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=75&t=8864
sample
some pretty pissed off people...talk about kicking apart a hornets nest.....
AH! So it was YOUR fault Zooterkin. I was egotistically wondering if RD had just gone apoplectic when a Christian (me) won the RD.net Science Writing Contest with my essay "Damning Darwin" - http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2010/...ils-of-myth-making-in-the-history-of-science/
cj x
Actually, it might have been you, after all.
Having checked the time I signed up, I realise it was over an hour after the announcement was posted.The admins did not look at the site extensively, I'd be surprised if they even scanned over the site. They messaged the mods about a month ago announcing that they were planning on shifting the forum to a new and better location. They asked for input and we gave them a lot of advice about what people wanted, where the most popular areas are, what not to do etc.
When we mentioned that the members can become quite riotous when presented news in a condescending way (i.e. treating them like children and making it difficult to save their work), they will split - like last October when we lost a significant proportion of our members.
The admin replied with "What happened last October?" - in other words, if the admin only knew one thing about the forum, it should have been that event. Regardless, they didn't know anything about what certain sub-forums were for, why the "tech-support" forum would not be better handled off site, etc etc. After a month, when all the mods had presented things that they thought were important to the forum, things that need to be fixed and things that could be done without given enough notice, the admin returned and presented that notice - ignoring everything we had said and not responding to any of it.
They knew what they wanted before even looking at the forum. They wanted a bigger front page discussion board. What happened in the forum was irrelevant, despite it having 10x as many members and 10x as many posts per day.
Then, as 95Theses noted, when some mods voiced their concerns over the change (in a rational way, usually without even swearing and never getting personal), they were instantly banned and all posts deleted.
It was just childish.
Don't get me wrong, I understand it's Richard Dawkins' money and foundation so he can do whatever he likes to it. I don't even have a problem with being told my services are no longer necessary. But you can't just spit on a loyal fanbase and delete years of contributions because they don't agree with you, then expect them to come back. Or worse, figure "**** it, we'll get other people".
The whole thing was just a result of terrible management and not having a clue about what the members were there for.
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a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
I believe the JREF long ago implemented a system which produces the desired similar end-result (public-facing/googleable portion of the forum about desired topics, private section about cats and pooper) without quite so draconian measures (ie. no private section, new topics must require approval).
I'm certainly interested in hearing what recursive prophet has to say about this, since RDF was held up so frequently by him in many discussions as an example of how "well" a system could work. I guess it wasn't working according to the guys who paid the bills, after all.
No, no, no, no, no. They totally destroyed the JREF forums, and the mods are still going full steam ahead to destroy this forum totally after their highly successful first round of changes. Due to their extreme incompetence, however, they haven't achieved the final ends yet.
Sledge
Grammaton Cleric
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2009
- Messages
- 7,114
Ok, and so what? The forum is closed anyway, so what does it matter if your posting history is removed?
Probably because some people on the internet put thought and effort into their posts?
The most obvious would be the members over there who have formed collaborations on research projects, academic articles etc where their original thoughts and messages might still be important for documentation, or even just sentimental reasons. Then there are the numerous users there that met their current spouses there and would like to save their conversations, PMs etc.
In short, there were some people who spent a lot of time there and naturally they made some very important posts - the importance of which were either academic, personal or sometimes a mixture of both. Some of the posts that were deleted were contact details between collaborators, which may have been lost and difficult to try to find again.
So yes, it's the internet so it's not as important as a sick child in a hospital or starvation in Africa, but when people are kicked in the balls it's sometimes nice to have an ice pack handy.
stijndeloose
Thinker
- Joined
- Jul 25, 2009
- Messages
- 145
Errr, what?! Not all posters have saved their favorite contributions to their hard disk and with the "Search", "View your posts" and "View active topics" functions disabled, this has become virtually impossible now.
I do not care THAT much about my personal history (though there were a couple of things I would've liked to save to my HD), but there were plenty of, say, Cali's posts, or Hack's, or Susu's that I would've loved to save to my hard-disk.
cj.23
Master Poster
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2006
- Messages
- 2,827
Because 30,000 posts are gone. And many of these, especially by Darwinsbulldog, were serious weighty essays on science, society and evolution, which are irrecoverable now. This is the 21st century equivalent of book-burning. We can still access the forum: copies are boing made of everything by teams of diligent volunteers - but their posts are gone forever, in a pointless act of digital vandalism. WHy if the forum was locked was it ever necessary to delete them?
j x