Dawkins sues Josh Timonen

[chalkers]

Chalkers and Andrew I do not trust you guys. I remember when in the latter days of the RDF when I was trying to log on it took an age, if I tried to post anything at all it was impossible. You two, at that time were either incompetent arsoles or your job was to wreck the forum. Which was it?

Chalkers is Andrew.

The site was falling over every 5 minutes or so back in June/July 2009 - if memory serves me. It was a pretty much a firefight when I got in. We performed a series of quick wins moving like moving off static assets to cloud files - http://richarddawkins.net/videos/3986-r ... nts?page=2 People noted an instant improvement there.

Gzipping wasn't switched on, so I switched that on and saved on bandwidth and money. We moved all smaller sites off the "web server" and rewrote them quickly so that people could still visit the "satellite sites" if the main site went down. That means the store, out campaign etc etc could still run if RD.net + Forum was down.

Then we moved the hosting completely where we could monitor resources more closely and monitor the processes running on the systems better and adjusted resources as needed.

It was getting better, but not perfect. But the firefight was over. We spoke with a guy from PHPBB and asked if all our mysql config was right etc. We should him our logs. Apparently, it looked alright. If anyone would have spotted if we were lacking in resources or a misconfiguration he'd have spotted it. We removed some heavy queries from the front end of the website too. Still not perfect - we tried installing some other caching tech for our phpBB but it wasn't compatible. We was at a dead end.

It was stalling from time to time and but it wasn't happening every five minutes like it was doing before. We could have thrown more and more resources at the thing and that would just mask the problem so we did this temporarily within the budget constraints.

I operated under the budget constraints, resources and put out as many fires as possible, with the main site in it's current state, that's all I could do. If that's incompetent than so be it.

Decisions were made and the rewrite happened, the rest is history. RD.net is now the US Foundation site and is loading faster than ever before with no significant downtime (due to coding issues).

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Not being critical just thought I'd mention - It took about 1-2 minutes after I pressed submit today to sign up! I think it's a testimony to phpBB

[lordpasternack]

Andrew, lawsuits are designed to get to the bottom of cases like this. Why not wait till the Judge gives his verdict? If he decides in favour of Josh, of course I will apologise profusely and try to make everything better. If he decides against Josh, well, then you should make your decision on what to do. But please don't prejudge the issue. You don't have to wait long. I believe the case is coming up during November.

Incidentally - if Richard really did say this, then he is more gobsmackingly naive than I'd feared. What. The. Fuck?

Lawsuits are not designed to 'get to the bottom' of an issue. Lawsuits are designed to prosecute or fail to prosecute someone who has genuinely aggrieved you, whom you have sound reason to believe transgressed the law in so doing. You are supposed to do the fucking 'getting to the bottom' part LONG before you take anything to court. Lawsuits are the final fucking resort, after you've had people get to the bottom of the issue, trawl through evidence, and most importantly, after you then fail to reach a settlement out of court... You go to court when you've actually got your case ready to make, and having failed at settling through other avenues. But really... I mean, maybe in the Dawkins land of comfortably oblivious and naive privilege do you throw money at lawyers and go to court before you even have a case you're convinced of...

And that's before you consider that a judge ruling in favour of Timonen doesn't necessarily mean that Timonen hadn't behaved like an arsepiece. The mind fucking boggles.

Richard, if you're reading this - are you HONESTLY that fucking naive? Are you seriously so completely removed from the real world? Such a complete chump? Jesus tittyfucking Christ Almighty - have fucking mercy on me! Wow. I am speechless. Just... No... No...

But just let me know if you have any more money you're looking to throw away. Your trash could be my treasure, and I'd be happy to do my bit to earn it. In fact, I probably already have - what with already consistently having had more of a clue than your protégés, anyway. You could always hire Cormac and I. I may be officially less experienced in the field than Cormac, but we're good friends, capable of working well and learning from each other, and I can throw in complementary blowjobs (satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back), and can provide references if need be.

[charlou]

So many egos, so little time ...

[chalkers]

You worked on the old forum, you have some axes to grind, and camel toes are a real sticking point for you.

It was an interesting conference call explaining what a camel toe was

There were other threads discussed, I think there was a sense of embarrassment because of threads like "What music should I listen to as an atheist" type threads.

[hadespussercats]

You worked on the old forum, you have some axes to grind, and camel toes are a real sticking point for you.

It was an interesting conference call explaining what a camel toe was

There were other threads discussed, I think there was a sense of embarrassment because of threads like "What music should I listen to as an atheist" type threads.

This is the sort of thinking that leads to the notion that atheists are joyless automatons.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Thanks, Cormac. Your analysis about why and how RDN failed (in two semi-long posts, a few posts above) about sums it up IMO, too.

Andrew (if it is you): when you're doing a job, you're supposed to know how to do it, or learn if you don't already know - read, ask questions, try things out (small scale) etc. That is called professionalism. If then someone "higher up" tells you to do your job in a shitty/unprofessional way, you tell them (first nicely, then more forcefully) what the likely negative consequences of such actions will be, and if they don't believe you, you go to their boss. That, too, is called professionalism - not allowing your organization or your client to shoot themselves in the foot. If nobody believes your well-founded professional opinion - get the hell out, and fast. No (desk) job is worth taking the bullet for your bosses, IMO. Competent people will always find new jobs, no point in staying in bed with people who can tarnish your professional reputation, too, while making mistakes you cannot stop them from making, if they are truly determined.

Just my experience. Your mileage may vary.

Thanks Ronja. I walked due to the boss' boss not listening about the boss' crazy behaviour. How ever nicely you suggested something contrary to the boss' will, I was ultimately doing things which were making me unhappy - clients will be clients. The last action which they asked me to do that broke the camels back they haven't executed yet. If that's due to a lack of competence or I changed their mind I don't know. I am out of the loop now. I said that this boss' direction would cause the fall of the Foundation. We'll see. I left with a full handover and have been co-operative with any technical needs when asked.

Frankly, it's a disgrace what RD and RDFRS are doing in not co-operating in producing evidence and prolonging this process. RD said he'd apologise and make things better. I haven't seen any sign of this so far. Unless he was just saying that to appease me 'cause he didn't want me to leave, which I suspect now. The judge has ordered monetary sanctions and ordered them to produce docs an they still haven't, with Josh posting those updates to dawkinssuestimonen.com with the filing of terminating sanctions, I hope RD is true to his words he said to me. He told me to stay their 'til January, and wait for the judges' decision, here we are in July and they're still making excuses about not producing docs. Glad I walked.

What is it with you and camels?

[lordpasternack]

You worked on the old forum, you have some axes to grind, and camel toes are a real sticking point for you.

It was an interesting conference call explaining what a camel toe was

There were other threads discussed, I think there was a sense of embarrassment because of threads like "What music should I listen to as an atheist" type threads.

Then why the fuck wasn't this raised with forum staff, at any point? Not even a gentle nudge?

And some of the threads even now are of that calibre. It's pretty much the status quo, only shitter than it used to be. Marginally better in some areas, but overall, shitter.

[Bella Fortuna]

You worked on the old forum, you have some axes to grind, and camel toes are a real sticking point for you.

It was an interesting conference call explaining what a camel toe was

There were other threads discussed, I think there was a sense of embarrassment because of threads like "What music should I listen to as an atheist" type threads.

This must be taking the piss. That was considered embarrassing??

So much for all the heartfelt appeals many of us made about the sense of community, camaraderie, and social pleasure we found at the old RDF. Little did we know how we were embarrassing ourselves by displaying near-human frailty! Woe!

[Ronja]

Very interesting. The plot definitely thickens.

BTW - be careful of what you post - the current UK libel laws are pretty draconian, and in principle global (if the "injured" party has a "credible" connection to the UK, or legalese to that effect).

It was just a couple of felching ads

.

Charlou - my comment was for Andrew (chalkers).

[lordpasternack]

Well, it seems that Richard Dawkins is far, far, far more naive than I feared. And this cluster fuck is far less simple than I suspected.

But can I just say - I said to Richard in an email the other day that I would refrain from calling him an idiot for rhetorical effect. I retract that. Richard, if certain things said here are correct - you're an idiot - a complete fucking, howling, gobsmacking, risible, tear-inducing idiot. And I still deeply like and respect you - but MY FUCKING GOD...! This is bad... This is WORSE...

[chalkers]

And some of the threads even now are of that calibre. It's pretty much the status quo, only shitter than it used to be. Marginally better in some areas, but overall, shitter.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. Only RDFRS approved.

[lordpasternack]

And some of the threads even now are of that calibre. It's pretty much the status quo, only shitter than it used to be. Marginally better in some areas, but overall, shitter.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. Only RDFRS approved.

Can we start alluding to Animal Farm and other Orwell hits, yet?

[chalkers]

And some of the threads even now are of that calibre. It's pretty much the status quo, only shitter than it used to be. Marginally better in some areas, but overall, shitter.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. Only RDFRS approved.

Can we start alluding to Animal Farm and other Orwell hits, yet?

Only Peter Pan and Battlestar for now.

[rachelbean]

Just a couple thoughts:

You aren't going to find many Dawkins acolytes on this site. Though many of us met through RDF, few are devotees of the man himself although a good percentage of us respect his scientific work and writings.

That being said, I am not sure that the animosity towards Josh is completely deserved, though I doubt we'll ever know the whole truth. What I do know is he was the face and the voice of what happened during the fall-out and certainly seemed to be the one calling the shots as far as the timing and specific technical decisions during the blow-up. You won't find many people here who disagree with the idea that the foundation had every right to decide what content they wanted to include on their site, even if we personally have different ideas and viewpoints on it. What caused the problem was not the shutting down of the site, but the immediate and incompetent way it was done which seemed to have a goal of cutting off any kind of communication between members of the community and blaming them completely for how and why it was done. Essentially,"Thanks for your years of helping build up this community, but you've embarrassed Richard, now fuck off and shut up".

If I rationally think about it I can even understand why signatures would be disabled, but what in the world would be the point of disabling PMs or deleting accounts and all their posts with them? It seemed that many of the decisions were being made out of spite because of the angry response and it just escalated from there especially because of the misrepresentation of events that continued to be broadcast. Many/most assumed that Josh was the one giving Richard the information that led to things like his little scolding letter.

I think you'll find most people on THIS site really just don't give a shit what happens in the case because there isn't a heck of a lot of love left for either party

[Thinking Aloud]

either party

There are parties?