Announcement about RDF Part 3.

[fuck you & fuck your god]

josh mazille

josh moderators mazille forum

Seriously? People are googling for me?

I'M FUCKING FAMOUS!

With a face like that, how can you be surprised?

[Ilovelucy]

I know this has been mentioned a few times, but I have a feeling that the worst of the reaction to dissent ( deletions and rick roling) were the work of Chalkers and not Josh. We know this because we could see the IP location of who was using the admin account while we could still access the admin centre. The odious, I'm so wacky, twat face of his avatar seems to betray him as the kind of cretin that think's he's being genuinely hilarious by punking us with a 2008 internet meme in 2010.

[Mazille]

josh mazille

josh moderators mazille forum

Seriously? People are googling for me?

I'M FUCKING FAMOUS!

With a face like that, how can you be surprised?

[klr]

I know this has been mentioned a few times, but I have a feeling that the worst of the reaction to dissent ( deletions and rick roling) were the work of Chalkers and not Josh. We know this because we could see the IP location of who was using the admin account while we could still access the admin centre. The odious, I'm so wacky, twat face of his avatar seems to betray him as the kind of cretin that think's he's being genuinely hilarious by punking us with a 2008 internet meme in 2010.

So we have firm evidence that it was chalkers with his finger on the button? Excellent. Of course, he could hardly do all that without having some sort of imprimatur from Josh Timonen, even if he did exceed his authority/was technically out of his depth.

Do we want old-man Patterson here with his finger on the button? - Homer Simpson

[Nora_Leonard]

You'll notice I'm not agreeing with many of you, and still see Richard as a victim, although I admit that it's not impossible that he may be behind it all. The point of the entry is to make people realise that discussing the system change isn't the big issue. It's the tactics that need to be highlighted.

I know you are still giving Richard the benefit of the doubt, which many of us aren't prepared to do. For me, the 'quote-mining' in his 'outrage' statement, although quite possibly based on misinformation fed to him, is too reminiscent of the way he picks the worst of religion and religious people to highlight. He also still manages to dismiss the value of the forum. And although a huge fan of the forum I was never a fan of him personally.

But the fact is that you (along with several others) have given a very good account of the events that is consistent with what many of the rest of us witnessed. And for that all of us should be grateful.

I'd also like to point out that as soon as someone pointed out an error in your account you admitted the mistake and went in and changed it.

I think we're all still waiting for Richard to do that.

So here's to you, Peter. Even if we do disagree about the culpability of the man himself.

[ozewiezeloose]

You'll notice I'm not agreeing with many of you, and still see Richard as a victim, although I admit that it's not impossible that he may be behind it all. The point of the entry is to make people realise that discussing the system change isn't the big issue. It's the tactics that need to be highlighted.

If he IS a victim, he's also been intellectually lazy through-out this affair. If he doesn't really know what happened, his "Outrage" post was as premature as it could be, and unjustified.

[ED209]

You'll notice I'm not agreeing with many of you, and still see Richard as a victim, although I admit that it's not impossible that he may be behind it all. The point of the entry is to make people realise that discussing the system change isn't the big issue. It's the tactics that need to be highlighted.

If he IS a victim, he's also been intellectually lazy through-out this affair. If he doesn't really know what happened, his "Outrage" post was as premature as it could be, and unjustified.

IMO it was penned by his quote-mining IT monkey and only rubber-stamped by Dawkins...or written by a seriously and intentionally mislead Dawkins. I'm not taking it as any reflection of the man's intellectual laziness or otherwise

[Ilovelucy]

I know this has been mentioned a few times, but I have a feeling that the worst of the reaction to dissent ( deletions and rick roling) were the work of Chalkers and not Josh. We know this because we could see the IP location of who was using the admin account while we could still access the admin centre. The odious, I'm so wacky, twat face of his avatar seems to betray him as the kind of cretin that think's he's being genuinely hilarious by punking us with a 2008 internet meme in 2010.

So we have firm evidence that it was chalkers with his finger on the button? Excellent. Of course, he could hardly do all that without having some sort of imprimatur from Josh Timonen, even if he did exceed his authority/was technically out of his depth.

Do we want old-man Patterson here with his finger on the button? - Homer Simpson

I'm not able to go in now and confirm, but we saw two IP addresses accessing the admin account, and one of them was the same IP as Chalkers. This was the one that was the most active when the shit went down. From our correspondence with Chalkers in modtopia and the tech section, he came across as a patronising and arrogant tosser who had no respect for the mod team or the social aspect of the forum. My experience of Josh shows him to be someone who doesn't want the hassle and is eager to pass it down to someone else by saying "Take care of it" without wanting the burden of knowing how it's done. I would also say that in terms of understanding the value of the forum, Josh had an inkling whereas Chalkers was the new boy with a hardon for the new software and little regard for anyone else. In short I can easily picture Chalkers hitting delete and not caring, whereas Josh really wouldn't want the kind of shitstorm that's blowing his way right now.

[Jerome23]

The blog has taken in well over 10000 views now, so it continues to be the best place to post new information regarding this incredible mess.

You'll notice I'm not agreeing with many of you, and still see Richard as a victim, although I admit that it's not impossible that he may be behind it all. The point of the entry is to make people realise that discussing the system change isn't the big issue. It's the tactics that need to be highlighted.

I don't see Richard as a victim at all: he is fairly bright and certainly understands the interwebz, and if he was handed those quotes from Ratz and told they were what led to the closure of the forum he should have checked his fucking sources -- I'm sorry my old undergrads would have not got away with such an elementary error. He tried to do something which may be quite reasonable, it was botched, there was anger, a twat reacted in a childish and stupid way banning people deleting rickrolling etc, and Richard got angry and defended his friend while sounding like an utterly pompous prick, because ultimately it's apparently a trivial matter to him. When he cools off he might be able to see that he was speaking rashly, and we might resolve this, and all enjoy the new baords or whatever they are. I doubt he will, but RD often surprises me, so I hope i'm wrong.


My blog accounts of stuff have done pretty well - three fairly short pieces, 1,677 hits in two days, with End of an Era: Richard Dawkins Forum Closes now my 9th most popular piece of all time (though still 7,000 hits behind my essay on early twentieth century Futurist Art!) Amusingly while a number of people are coming from Google ("richard dawkins forum" search term) most of my readers are coming from Facebook, the JREF, TAF, here, Sceptics in the Pub and similar UK Sceptical groups I'm affiliated with (oh yeah I feature as a guest again on a sceptic podcast soon - I'll mention it when its out) and Darkchilde's blog. ( I have only had four hits from Peter's blog, maybe not linked? mine is linked via an update.) I doubt I have anything to say I have not said here already but my blog might amuse: http://jerome23.wordpress.com/

Relevant articles
http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2010/02/2 ... -to-close/
http://jerome23.wordpress.com/2010/02/2 ... f-history/


YOu can also find masses of material on parapsychology (from someone who actually knows what they are talking about - me! ), and the debunking myths section might amuse.But enough of my blog.

j x

[CJ]

I know this has been mentioned a few times, but I have a feeling that the worst of the reaction to dissent ( deletions and rick roling) were the work of Chalkers and not Josh. We know this because we could see the IP location of who was using the admin account while we could still access the admin centre. The odious, I'm so wacky, twat face of his avatar seems to betray him as the kind of cretin that think's he's being genuinely hilarious by punking us with a 2008 internet meme in 2010.

So we have firm evidence that it was chalkers with his finger on the button? Excellent. Of course, he could hardly do all that without having some sort of imprimatur from Josh Timonen, even if he did exceed his authority/was technically out of his depth.

Do we want old-man Patterson here with his finger on the button? - Homer Simpson

I'm not able to go in now and confirm, but we saw two IP addresses accessing the admin account, and one of them was the same IP as Chalkers. This was the one that was the most active when the shit went down. From our correspondence with Chalkers in modtopia and the tech section, he came across as a patronising and arrogant tosser who had no respect for the mod team or the social aspect of the forum. My experience of Josh shows him to be someone who doesn't want the hassle and is eager to pass it down to someone else by saying "Take care of it" without wanting the burden of knowing how it's done. I would also say that in terms of understanding the value of the forum, Josh had an inkling whereas Chalkers was the new boy with a hardon for the new software and little regard for anyone else. In short I can easily picture Chalkers hitting delete and not caring, whereas Josh really wouldn't want the kind of shitstorm that's blowing his way right now.

Thanks for the insight.

[laklak]

So that's him, eh? Ginger twat.

[Babel]

So that's him, eh? Ginger twat.

gingers have a soul you know! (youtube for those not knowing what i'm refering to)

[owtth]

Hey guys, I haven't posted in a week or so, anything going on?


looks about:
Sweet fuck!

[Mr.Samsa]

I know a number of people have tried messaging Richard, but after reading the "Outrage" announcement and sitting on it for a few hours, I simply can't sit back and not say anything to him. I apologise if I'm stepping on anyone's toes by sending this message, or if I've said anything that is incorrect or counterproductive, but here is what I sent:

Dear Prof. Dawkins,

I know you are busy with your current tour throughout Australia and New Zealand, and I know the events of the forum are not a high priority for you at this time, so I will try to keep this brief.

There have already been a number of members who have messaged you with extensive details of the event that took place so I will try not to repeat information of which you are already aware, but I feel that your representation of events in your "Outrage" post is so far removed from reality that I could not leave it without trying to reason with you.

The short version is: people are not angry about the change in forum software. In fact a lot of people really are quite excited about this. The vitriol, the anger and the protests were in direct reply to the way they were poorly treated.

To expand on this, in your post, the basic timeline of events appears to be "Announcement of a new website structure" then "Nasty comments being made about Josh". In reality, the timeline of events following the announcement included the creation of a thread where the members congregated to discuss how upset they were, how confused they were and how excited they were over the new changes. There was some anger in this thread, but it was reasonably mild and it was all aimed at the moderators. I should mention that I am/was a moderator of this forum and I, along with my fellow volunteers, were shocked and confused to find ourselves thrust into this situation where we were forced to defend ourselves by pointing out that the new changes were as much a surprise to us as they were to the members (whilst we had been promised "new and exciting changes coming soon", we had no real details of what was to happen).

So, whilst trying to defend ourselves, a moderator posted the message Josh and Andrew had sent to us as evidence of our innocence. This act was met with the immediate deletion of this moderator's membership and his entire post history being removed. The forum was then locked and the thread where everyone was trying to understand what the new changes entailed was deleted. In protest, a member went to the front page asking the admin to explain their decision as it seemed highly unjust and unnecessary - this member was then deleted, along with his entire posting history.

On the forum, people were eager to contact their friends, internet adversaries, even research collaborators to try to exchange details or to organise a meeting point to discuss what had just occurred. However, they found that the Private Messaging feature has been limited to what seems to be about 1 post being allowed to be sent per every 12 hours. All signatures were removed after people had left details about where they can be contacted and found if people wished to do so. On top of this, when people attempted to archive the remaining posts in the forum (at this stage, 30-40,000 posts had been deleted over the space of a couple of hours) they found that someone had stored the Rick Astley video clip "Never Gonna Give You Up" onto the forum database (a common internet meme where people pretend to link to some site or location of information, only to be met with Rick Astley - otherwise known as a "rickroll"), making it impossible to save any data unless you could write your own code to get around this.

After numerous prolific posters had been deleted without warning nor reason, after the search system had been taken down and the messaging feature had been disabled beyond practical functionality, some people gathered on an external site and vented their frustrations at a person who they saw as not only treating them very poorly, but also a person who seemed intent on making it impossible for them to retain their contacts they had made over their years here at the Oasis.

Now here I should note that I in no way condone the nasty messages that were made about Josh (although I do feel that taken out of context in your announcement they appeared worse than they were in context - however, still ultimately inexcusable), but you have to understand that RDF was a community of people who valued science, reason and rationality. To accuse them of becoming rabid animals when faced with the prospect of change not only does the members a disservice, but I also feel it does you and this Oasis you built a disservice. If the people were becoming angry because the person who owns this entire website wants to change/remove the forum section, then I would join you and tell them to stop acting like children.

But this is not what the people are angry about. The people who have dedicated not only thousands of hours of their time supporting your goals, but also donated significant sums of money to the foundation, those who have literally risked their lives to come to this forum and to expand their knowledge of science (by using dummy IP addresses in the Middle East to avoid being arrested), came online on Monday to find a couple of users they don't recognise deleting members and thousands of posts without reason. In other words, those who dedicated a substantial amount of time to supporting you, felt like they were given a kick in the teeth for their loyalty.

I understand if this message doesn't change your view of the situation, and I do apologise for it being much lengthier than I had hoped for, but if there is one point I can try to drive home then it is this: the change in forum software is absolutely irrelevant to the events that transpired, all that matters is that the members here were treated like something you step in on a farm when valuable information was wiped from existence before their very eyes.

The internet is a wonderful new place in this world, and the information that is stored here is no longer meaningless strings of text - it is books, research, knowledge. The wanton deletion of this information invokes the same feelings of the members here as those of the people unfortunate enough to live through the days of book burnings. This is why we are angry, not because of some silly software change.

Again, I apologise for taking up so much of your time with this message, I know you have much more important matters to attend to. I wish you all the best with your tour and I hope the new discussion board proves to be highly successful for the foundation - I know that personally I will be there when it opens doing everything I can to help.

Thank you for listening,
Michael O.
("Mr.Samsa" - Ex-forum moderator)

NOTE: The opinions I have stated in this post are purely my own and I do not speak on behalf of the members, nor do I speak for any of the other ex-moderators.

I doubt he'll read it all as it's much too long, and I seriously doubt he'll reply, but I figured I should post it here in case the next announcement is "Some Wanker Just PMed Me" - so if things get worse from this point on, it's probably my fault...

[hackenslash]

Beautiful, Michael. Precisely my sentiments.