Announcement about RDF Part 3.

[Posse Comitatus]

500+ in the space of 3 days.

Are they actually posting?

Off topic (I very rarely make a post on topic come to think of it) but I've just noticed that it's coming up to a year since I joined (and then promptly stopped posting). Everything seems to have changed so much.

In this time I have also developed a profound sense of love and admiration for Rowan Williams and found time to peruse further my fixation with old churches.

[Bella Fortuna]

500+ in the space of 3 days.

Are they actually posting?

Off topic (I very rarely make a post on topic come to think of it) but I've just noticed that it's coming up to a year since I joined (and then promptly stopped posting). Everything seems to have changed so much.

In this time I have also developed a profound sense of love and admiration for Rowan Williams and found time to peruse further my fixation with old churches.

Many are. You'd have to look at the member list sorted by date joined to see...

[laklak]

How many new people have come here since the RDF meltdown? We need a lookup table to translate names for all those who took different names here too. I'm looking forward to reconnecting with some old friends now. I see this as a great opportunity for Rationalia to reach critical mass.

Well I'll be fucked, if it ain't FUWF. Loooong time dude. How's that love swing thingy working out?

[Pombolo]

It's such a shame that Dawkins doesn't understand the futility of his high-minded "Boo hoo, the culture of the internet!" emo whinge. Now that Josh has set a standard for arbitrary deletions of people's entire history of forum contributions, he will actually encourage the kind of culture he seeks to dilute.

People will be disuaded from putting time and effort into long, well-constructed forum posts if they think that, subject to the 'Whim of Josh', they can be deleted at any moment. Pithy and trite OPs, ones that do not require much incisive thought or originality: those that the posters can happily not give a damn about if they are deleted, they will be the ones people throw into the new forum.

How can he endorse a person, and action, by using a justification that will actually be exacerbated by that action?

[Heresiarch]

How many new people have come here since the RDF meltdown? We need a lookup table to translate names for all those who took different names here too. I'm looking forward to reconnecting with some old friends now. I see this as a great opportunity for Rationalia to reach critical mass.

Some bright spark (not me {obviously}) suggested that we use the "About me" part of out profile to display our previous names and thus avoid confusion. I have complied with the wishes of said bright spark who's old and new name both escape me.

[Beatsong]

It's such a shame that Dawkins doesn't understand the futility of his high-minded "Boo hoo, the culture of the internet!" emo whinge. Now that Josh has set a standard for arbitrary deletions of people's entire history of forum contributions, he will actually encourage the kind of culture he seeks to dilute.

People will be disuaded from putting time and effort into long, well-constructed forum posts if they think that, subject to the 'Whim of Josh', they can be deleted at any moment. Pithy and trite OPs, ones that do not require much incisive thought or originality: those that the posters can happily not give a damn about if they are deleted, they will be the ones people throw into the new forum.

How can he endorse a person, and action, by using a justification that will actually be exacerbated by that action?

I get the impression this is a huge part of the problem.

Reading between the lines of RD's "Outrage" response, I got the feeling he was a bit of a crusty old fart who didn't really like the internet or understand it much.

For a start, we all know that when people go online, hyperbole often gets the better of them. It goes with the territory. It's already been pointed out that some of the insults were really FUNNY - and who here hasn't either dished out or recieved such insults in the past, to the point where you don't quite know whether to be more and more outraged, or cllapse in heaps of laughter with your "adversary". None of it means anything much, because it's only the fuckin internet.

Secondly, I'm gobsmacked that RD didn't understand (a) just what a fantastic forum he had, and (b) how easily it could all be trashed by pissing everybody off like this. The standard of contributions to RD.net was stonkingly high. Yes, there was a lot of talking shit as well, as there always is. Maybe RD didn't really understand how much LESS of this there was than there is on most forums - just how high his signal-to-noise ration was by comparison.

Now he's gonna set up a nice little sanitised message page where people can write in and beg for the privilege of positing a few lines - in the hope that it will feel a little bit more "in control". And nobody with any personality or imagination is going to go anywhere near it. The actual internet action shifting as it always does to the places run by people who understand the internet and how it works best.

I don't know where the forum fitted into his business and the whole RD Foundation thing. But it brought a huge number of people to his site (hence the technical problems, after all). He was probably starting to feel it was a bit of a PITA - without realising, as I said, just how much less of a one it was than most forums. I get the impression he really had no idea that something like this would piss people off so much that they won't want to touch him with a barge-pole in future. After all they arranged to leave all accounts intact, presumeably reasoning (bizarrely) that we'd all just want to carry on business as usual.

It's all very sad. But hey, technology and communication changes, and you can get with the time or not. Everyone's got the right not to be interested in the internet. But if you're gonna get involved, it makes sense to do it properly, and understand what you're doing.

[JimC]

How many new people have come here since the RDF meltdown? We need a lookup table to translate names for all those who took different names here too. I'm looking forward to reconnecting with some old friends now. I see this as a great opportunity for Rationalia to reach critical mass.

Ah, you do know what happens to a mass of fissile material when it reaches critical mass, I take it?

I don't want Ratz to go bang!

[M]

How many new people have come here since the RDF meltdown? We need a lookup table to translate names for all those who took different names here too. I'm looking forward to reconnecting with some old friends now. I see this as a great opportunity for Rationalia to reach critical mass.

Ah, you do know what happens to a mass of fissile material when it reaches critical mass, I take it?

Is this another post about having a poo?

[Valden]

As I slowly attempt to move past this, I can't help but think that even those the on-line news articles, and even RD himself have got it wrong, we all know the truth. We know what really happened, how, and why.

[David M]

Unless he's gone through thousands of posts meticulously in a very short space of time, he doesn't know if they were deleted needlessly and mendaciously. I don't know if they were deleted needlessly and mendaciously. You (Skinny Puppy) don't know if they were deleted needlessly and mendaciously. only Josh and the RDF team know. Yet you and that guy have hung drawn and quartered Richard and the RDF team.

A bit of simple analysis shows your argument to be wrong.

A user has his account deleted. All posts by that user are thus deleted. If a user has thousands of posts then either:

A) These thousands of posts were all in contravention of the rules and should be deleted. If this is the case they would have been individually deleted soon after they were created rather than by account deletion and the person deleting them would need to review them all.

or

B) These thousands of posts were not in contravention of the rules and should not have been deleted. As we are talking about thousands of posts over months, if not years, the logical assumption is that almost without exception none of the posts broke the forum rules.

Your ignorance of the events, or desire to promote lies, is obvious as you fail to connect that simple truth that there is ample evidence still on the RD forums that people had their entire posting history deleted going back for months, material that members were told they could archive. You could check that yourself by going to say, the science discussion sub forum where you can see stickied threads marked as created by people whose posts no longer exist in those threads.

Just to make it easy for you here is a thread started by Mazille back in December.

http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtop ... 5&t=104683

So there is a valid post about the science writing competition deleted, how do you justify that this was not done needlessly. Thats hard evidence of what was done.

[klr]

Another thought:

Does anyone here believe that there was ever any genuine intention to preserve the old forum post history in the new all-singing, all-dancing discussion area? If it was actually intended, then there should be a mountain of "work process" lying around as evidence. Work done by either the in-house people (Josh and Andrew essentially), or some contracted party. The latter being more likely since neither of our two heroes strike me as being database experten. Someone should be able to produce design documents, schema, code, test plans, test data, the whole shooting gallery. Evidence to prove that this was a going concern. Because it's no trivial matter, no sirree. In fact, I had wondered at times why they were bothering to move to a new discussion environment at all, given how tricky moving the data to a new system would likely be. Why not just tart up the existing forum interface by whatever means possible?

The most reasonable conclusion for me is that they never gave any serious thought to it at all, and we were all just strung along until it was time to reveal the nasty truth. I don't even believe that they made an earnest attempt and realised at the last minute that they couldn't pull it off. Or if they did, it was reckless: You don't make a promise like that in advance unless you've scoped things out properly in advance.

[Calilasseia]

Hello klr. See nail? You just hit it on the head, bullseye, slam dunk.

Why didn't I think of this before you?

[klr]

Hello klr. See nail? You just hit it on the head, bullseye, slam dunk.

Why didn't I think of this before you?

Maybe because I tend to think in terms of database problems, being surrounded by huge databases and mountains of data.

Seriously though. I always thought the plan to write a new user interface and move all the existing data was completely and totally off-the-wall. I couldn't make sense of it all. I guess that like other fairy tales, it was too much to be actually true.

[Dr. Kwaltz]

Another thought:

Does anyone here believe that there was ever any genuine intention to preserve the old forum post history in the new all-singing, all-dancing discussion area? If it was actually intended, then there should be a mountain of "work process" lying around as evidence. Work done by either the in-house people (Josh and Andrew essentially), or some contracted party. The latter being more likely since neither of our two heroes strike me as being database experten. Someone should be able to produce design documents, schema, code, test plans, test data, the whole shooting gallery. Evidence to prove that this was a going concern. Because it's no trivial matter, no sirree. In fact, I had wondered at times why they were bothering to move to a new discussion environment at all, given how tricky moving the data to a new system would likely be. Why not just tart up the existing forum interface by whatever means possible?

The most reasonable conclusion for me is that they never gave any serious thought to it at all, and we were all just strung along until it was time to reveal the nasty truth. I don't even believe that they made an earnest attempt and realised at the last minute that they couldn't pull it off. Or if they did, it was reckless: You don't make a promise like that in advance unless you've scoped things out properly in advance.

Not only that but you just don't go and do a cut-over from system A to system B without thorough testing, esp load testing as the performance may be turned upside down with a new system, disk contention on frequently used tables, locking issues, backup and recovery issues. Normally you would have a beta testing period of the new software, then move existing data over and turn the old into read-only and then run the two in parallel until most kinks have been worked out and it has been verified that old data is accessible and can actually be found etc.

This is a process that at best would take months to accomplish, with a large forum like RDF, even longer.

Too me, the new forum sounded like Vaporware

[Lion IRC]

Well, I'm sure they were just about to provide that paper trail " work process proof" but if you're going to be all "like that" you dont then deserve to see it. *arms folded* Hmmmph!



Lion (IRC)
PS - Just taking the emots for a test drive.