Announcement about RDF Part 2.

[Conny]

FYI http://epicpancakes.wordpress.com/2010/ ... df-forums/

[Wondering Fart]

JW! Good to see you, dear!

[zoon]

I’m with the ones who think God did it. Being imaginary never stopped him having heretics burnt alive.

The weird part is removing all the previous posts. The rest might be explained as technical problems, personality clashes etc, but I don’t see what Josh Timonen or the Richard Dawkins Foundation gain from deleting previous posts, given that it would be fairly simple and cheap just to leave them in a read-only state. The people who clearly benefit from the removal of a Wikipedia-sized archive of powerful anti-theist argumentation are the God squad.

A conspiracy theory makes me feel a bit better.

[ozewiezeloose]

Tytalus's comment from the Homeopathy thread:

It is interesting, how comparable the placebo effect in homeopathy is to the supposed 'power' of prayer. Just like prayer, homeopaths give people the sense of doing something about their ails, even if it's pointless, even if the homeopaths benefit financially from lying to such people.

I guess it might be something like building a huge fan base with a web site and then lying to your fans about its future. Or are the lost fans foolish for saying anything about it, just getting the sense of doing something -- however futile? Time will tell, I suppose.

[Heresiarch]

From his pronouncments like “Using a forum as a substitute for a real website is sloppy and lazy.” JT has absolutely no business working in the web design industry since he has no clue about his target audience. I write that as an IT professional with 30 years experience who has to deal with tossers like this every day. They think they know it all. They don't and when they screw up everyone else pays. (On the plus side I've made quite a good living clearing up after assorted wunderkind).

You needed to read his thoughts to work out that he knows nothing about usability or interface design? You should have been able to work that out just by visiting the RD.net home page. Two sidebars overloaded with information and images. A third (almost) side bar on the right side with a tabbed interface to switch between two somehow different types of news. Only ever a single article on the rest of the page, squashed into the little space available so that most of it ends up with four words to a column. All that's really missing from it is a really busy background to make it impossible to read the text, under construction signs and flashing text.

I've no idea on his level of competence as a coder or as an admin, but he knows fuck all about design.

[HughMcB]

One more flagging of that post, and we'll see if the FP co-ordinator himself is immune to having a comment binned or not.

Consider this as a form of research.

And please don't ask how I know this ...

EDIT: It's now been flagged 6 times, and is still in place. 5 should get the comment sent to the alternate thread. I guess my hypothesis has been upheld.

The plot moistens....

[tytalus]

I tried to strike a balance between 'subtle' and 'zinger'. And self-deprecating, had to toss that in.

[klr]

One more flagging of that post, and we'll see if the FP co-ordinator himself is immune to having a comment binned or not.

Consider this as a form of research.

And please don't ask how I know this ...

EDIT: It's now been flagged 6 times, and is still in place. 5 should get the comment sent to the alternate thread. I guess my hypothesis has been upheld.

The plot moistens....

My hypothesis being that /Mike is immune to the cumulative effects of flagging. The programmer in me wonders if would have been easier to stop people from flagging his comments in the first place.

Another part of me is much more Machiavellian.

[ozewiezeloose]

More posts, guys! Flood 'em!

[Tortured_Genius]

From his pronouncments like “Using a forum as a substitute for a real website is sloppy and lazy.” JT has absolutely no business working in the web design industry since he has no clue about his target audience. I write that as an IT professional with 30 years experience who has to deal with tossers like this every day. They think they know it all. They don't and when they screw up everyone else pays. (On the plus side I've made quite a good living clearing up after assorted wunderkind).

You needed to read his thoughts to work out that he knows nothing about usability or interface design? You should have been able to work that out just by visiting the RD.net home page. Two sidebars overloaded with information and images. A third (almost) side bar on the right side with a tabbed interface to switch between two somehow different types of news. Only ever a single article on the rest of the page, squashed into the little space available so that most of it ends up with four words to a column. All that's really missing from it is a really busy background to make it impossible to read the text, under construction signs and flashing text.

I've no idea on his level of competence as a coder or as an admin, but he knows fuck all about design.

Oh, I never bothered to look at his crapola website and TBH had never heard of him until today. That comment was picked up from Peter Harrison's blog, then I looked at the RDF page, then posted a comment about hijacking, which I'll stand by - his page counter is probably huge and the tit didn't realise it was due to people "passing through" rather than looking at his eye-bending graphics.

I'm not a designer - but that website......hurts.

[Matt H]

More reasoned posts, please. I'm still holding out a glimmer of hope that Richard didn't fully sign up to what Josh was doing. After all, Richard used the forum himself a fair amount, so he can't have been blind to it. If we have enough people offering polite resistance maybe something might happen.

Richard reads the front page. Maybe if he sees our posts and decides to check out the blogs of Peter Harrison, DarkChilde et al, he might just pick up that phone and tell Josh to put things the way they were.

[Valden]

Josh really is a wannabe Stalin. He's pissing all over history. First he deleted user accounts and posts, now he's saying the people who left left because they wanted a social network. FUCK THAT. That cunt never understood the forum, I bet he didn't once look at any of the science threads.

Hey, I just woke up. Do you have the link to him saying that?

[Wondering Fart]

More reasoned posts, please. I'm still holding out a glimmer of hope that Richard didn't fully sign up to what Josh was doing. After all, Richard used the forum himself a fair amount, so he can't have been blind to it. If we have enough people offering polite resistance maybe something might happen.

Richard reads the front page. Maybe if he sees our posts and decides to check out the blogs of Peter Harrison, DarkChilde et al, he might just pick up that phone and tell Josh to put things the way they were.

My hope is with you on that. I just don't picture Richard being as laissez-faire and uncaring as Timonen.

[ashley]

Here I am guys, did you miss me?
Ah, you didn't miss me at all did you? Knew I should have posted more often.


Since people have already been speculating, does anyone else reckon the whole "no leading them to other fora" might be because RD still has a bad taste in his mouth from when TAF started up and he called it childish or something and we made him apologise for being rude? Maybe he told Josh he didn't want a rerun of that.

[natselrox]

Josh really is a wannabe Stalin. He's pissing all over history. First he deleted user accounts and posts, now he's saying the people who left left because they wanted a social network. FUCK THAT. That cunt never understood the forum, I bet he didn't once look at any of the science threads.

Hey, I just woke up. Do you have the link to him saying that?

http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtop ... 0&t=110313

Happy Birthday!