Must add-in this piece from Cali in the Times comments:
As one of the former moderators of the forums, whose 2½ years of unpaid volunteer activity was declared surplus to requirements, allow me to present a few facts here, inconvenient though they may be for a juicy tabloid-style presentation painting the forum membership unjustly as an unwashed rabble of Neanderthals.
[1] The mod team was informed, months ago, that changes were to be made to the forum. However, details were not forthcoming. The mod team were not even shown basic screenshots of the protoptype new software in action, and all requests to provide the information we needed in order to implement the changes being decided upon in as seamless a manner as possible were simply ignored. I suspect a lot of foot soldiers in the IT world will be familiar with this scenario.
[2] When the public announcement was made to the forum membership, it was presented in such a manner as to suggest that the mod team assented in full to the changes that were being made, which was a blatant falsehood.
[3] When one of the moderators posted a message providing evidence to the membership that this was a blatant falsehood, said moderator was axed from the site. Not merely banned, but his entire user account destroyed, along with thousands of posts containing the very expositions of hard science that RD claims to be in favour of seeing more of.
[4] When forum members launched a thread critical of this move, the thread was summarily deleted, and several other users were expunged from the site, along with over 30,000 posts. Again, this included valuable material covering scientific topics, made accessible to the layman, of the very sort RD claims to be in favour of seeing posted. Which means that Josh Timonen, in deleting this material, was acting in direct contravention of the stated mission of his boss by destroying that material.
[5] Josh then placed the entire forum in read-only mode, wilfully destroyed information allowing members to maintain contact via other means, and in a move of truly juvenile petulance, redirected links intended to point to software backup portals to a Rick Astley video on YouTube (yes, he thought that rickrolling those wishing to back up their material constituted proper professional conduct).
[6] Members decanted in numbers to another forum, and vented their anger on that other forum..
[7] Josh lifted quote mined snippets from that forum, presented these to RD as if they constituted the substantive views of the exiled membership, whilst taking steps to ensure that his master never saw the substantive allegations against him with respect to the above-cited mendacious conduct, and took steps to hide his duplicity further by destroying moderator log entries that would have revealed his wilful vandalism of the forum and its contents.
[8] RD, placing a faintly ridiculous amount of trust in this individual, accepted these quote mines as fact, without checking his sources independently, and posted the tirade that has since become newsworthy.
In short, RD bestowed plenary powers upon Josh Timonen, who wilfully and maliciously abused them to entrench his own position of power. By doing so, Timonen has inflicted enormous damage upon his master's reputation, and indeed upon his master's stated mission, as cited above. Indeed, Dawkins' enemies amongst the professional liars for creationism could not have wished for a better result, had Timonen been planted within RD's organisation by them as a mole. Twenty years' hard work by Dawkins, alerting people to the dangers of doctrine centred world views, and attempting to educate people about valid science in the face of duplicitous ideological attack, has in effect been flushed down the toilet by his protegé.
