As one who was a participating member of the RDFnet forum for three years with more than 7,000 posts I can say that Bubblecar has it all wrong, dead wrong, in both of his comments. Horribly wrong. Unforgivingly wrong.
I can also attest to the notion that SimonGardner0, an old aquaintane from the site, has it dead right and I'd urge anyone who wants to know the truth of this matter to follow the link she provided in her comment. The story there was written by one of the unpaid, volunteer administrators who enjoyed a top notch reputation for his civility, integrity, honesty, and all round good character.
You can believe what he writes.
Prof. Dawkins is a busy man with a lot going on in his life. He didn't pay hardly any attention to the RDF forum, which he left to Josh Timonsen's management.
Josh elected to shut the site down whilst Prof. Dawkins was away in Australia on a speaking tour. Coincidence? Purposeful? We'll never know but it does not speak well. The announcement of a shutdown should more properly have come from Dawkins himself, not from a hireling.
The RDF forum was an envigorating and intellectually stimulating experience for me, a home away from home where I could be with like-minded folks in a warmly welcioming, receptive, and cordial atmosphere. Its membership formed a great community, one that shared the joys of new friendships and marriages and the pangs of deaths and losses, while providing a place where atheists stuck in the closet in some religious wilderness could feel safe and wecome. Thousands of members were of this kind.
Josh Timonsen destroyed that, without so much as a fare thee well, and in a fit of rage he deleted several thousand scientific posts that represented an exceedingly valuable resource for educators, students, and the public alike.
Shame on him.
Making the the RDF forum a read-only site, disabling its search function, deleting tens of thousans of posts, and many other shenanigans Josh pulled is tantamount to a Nazi book burning or a napalm drop on an innocent Vietnamese
ville.
Professor Dawkins owes an unconditional apology to every member of the 85,000-strong community he allowed to be destroyed; moreover, he owes a full and complete explanation for how and why the shutdown was handled with such sloth, incompentcy, and lack of respect for human values.
Lastly, Professor Dawkins' reputation and the reputation of his Foundation have been dealt a serious blow by this turn of events, a blow methinks he will be hard-pressed to recover from any time soon. He betrayed the very cause he has fought so hard for.
Refugees from the RDF forum have gathered and formed a new website,
http://www.rationalskepticism.org where the community is assembling and where it will carry on. All are welcome (ahem, save for cranks of assorted breeds!).
Thank you.
