Some comments made by Made of Stars and Flora/Topsy on Pharyngula:
Made of Stars wrote:Thanks to PZ for posting on this.
To those who say 'Dawkins is within his rights to shut down the forum': You're right. But you're missing the point.
The "Outrage", as Dawkins terms it, is not at the site being taken down, although there is some outrage at that.
The "Outrage" is at the way things have been done. These 'things' include:
+ Lying to the staff: We were promised consultation on the new format. We had started planning transition needs, worked on lists of tags so that old posts could be indexed to the new site, and tried to manage member concerns and expectations about the change. Ultimately, there was no consultation, just an announcement that the site would change, and we were no longer required (which is itself naive in the extreme)
+ Misrepresenting staff: There was no basis to assume that we would abuse our admin privileges through a transition, and absolutely no basis to flag this as a concern in the 'Announcement' made by 'admin'.
+ Banning individual staff and deleting their posts after they shared the 'instructions' not to resist change.
+ Demoting all the other forum mods ('blue mods') after the above event.
+ Locking the forum when dissent erupted.
+ Shutting down the PM system so people couldn't contact friends and arrange to meet elsewhere.
+ Disabling signatures and avatars that sprang up in an attempt to arrange off-site rendezvous.
+ Deleting (not suspending) dissenting members, including members who reasonably tried to contact Richard for an explanation.
+ Deleting admin logs recording the above actions. These could only have been reviewed by those involved, so why delete this evidence?
+ Continuing to disable the privileges of members who ask questions on the RD.net 'front page'. And deleting the admin logs of these actions.
+ Quote-mining the outraged posts of members who've regrouped elsewhere, and trying to pass them off as representative of all of our views.
+ Failing to provide any acknowledgement AT ALL of the thousands of man-hours provided free of charge by the staff. Not to mention the professional services offered by the staff with expertise in change management, communications, and software development. Expertise that could have helped avoid this cluster-fuck.
Personally, I'll now have 3-4 hours a day to spend doing other things than deal with reports, merge threads, deal with member emails, and moderate hot discussions between theists and atheists, creationists and evolutionary biologists, and conspiracy theorists and working scientists and engineers.
So I can't complain about that.
But what a shame to see it end in a way that was predicted and repeatedly flagged by a concerned staff.
Made of Stars
ex RD.net Forum Admin
Topsy wrote:Re: The Times article
I was feeling pretty sick when I read Richard's "Outrage" announcement because those insults he quoted were not at all representative of the vast majority of forum members, they were made AFTER the forum was locked and they were NOT sent to Josh or even posted on RD.net forum. They were harvested quotes from a very small minority of people posting elsewhere.
Richard has been informed of this and I was desperately hoping that he'd edit his announcement accordingly.
It's too late now because it's on the Times website and the thousands of loyal, intelligent, rational forum members have been misrepresented as a bunch of foul-mouthed, vitriolic thugs by the man who so inspired them.
To any moderate Christians reading this who have been labelled as disgusting due to the evil, homophobic rantings of the Westborough Baptist Church, I know how you feel.
Topsy wrote:Yes, many thanks to PZ for permitting people to correct the myth that there was a huge tide of vitriolic, abusive comments from the membership, directed at Josh and posted on the forum.
I'm still finding this very hard to believe that the thousands of members have been painted black by the comments of a few people made elsewhere.
The membership would largely have accepted the changed format if they had been informed of it with sensitivity and intelligence and most crucially, been told that their science and reason threads were valuable content that would be transferred over (or at least archived on the web).
Volunteer staff had already started preparing for this by contributing ideas for categories and were willing to test-run the new discussion area to provide constructive feedback on it before it was launched.
All this seems to have been ignored and the focus is on blaming everyone for a minority of hot-headed reactions to being told that this was now not going to happen and the forum would be deleted.
