Forum Announcements

This will be a listing of users that have been banned or suspended for rules violations (other than spambots that have been immediately deleted) Automatic suspensions for exceeding the 25-point limit of infractions are three days. (edit: points system no longer in use) Other suspensions and bans are from explicit moderator action. "Sabbatical" refers to a user-requested suspension/ban (update 4/24/09) ———————————————————— Zephir has been suspended for 1 week for repeated highjacking via off-topic posts of alternative theories in the physics section (including violations of rule 2.5, use of scientific threads to advertise a personal theory)

In the event that you need to contact an admin or moderator, please use the private messaging system. A list of administrators and moderators is available; click the icon to the right of a name to send a new message. If you cannot log in or need to contact us by email, send your message to staff at scienceforums dot net.

Dear all, Recently the amount of spam on the forum has increased. We are aware of this, and we are working on a solution (we know what caused it). The spam is generally of the crappiest quality and easy to recognize. Generally, we patrol the forum and remove any spam quite soon after it was posted, but if you think a particular spam message has been missed by the staff, please report it. Best regards, SFN Staff

Some of you may not be aware of the mod queue feature, or have seen it mentioned but do not know what it is. It's a new toy we received in one of the last major updates a while back, which allows staff to mark all posts made by a member as unapproved until staff are able to review it. We use this for a number of reasons, usually as an alternative to suspensions. The time limit we set on these is not set in stone. We can remove it as soon as we think the issues are resolved, or if this fails to be the case, we will either extend the time frame or suspend / ban the offending person. Since we have a thread for banned and suspended users, and since we have started using t…

AI-generated content must be clearly marked. Failing to do so will be considered to be plagiarism and posting in bad faith. IOW, you can’t use a chatbot to generate content that we expect a human to have made Since LLMs do not generally check for veracity, AI content can only be discussed in Speculations. It can’t be used to support an argument in discussions. Owing to the propensity for AI to fabricate citations, we strongly encourage links to citations be included as a best practice. Mods and experts might demand these if there are questions about their legitimacy. A fabricated citation is bad-faith posting. Posters are responsible for any rules violatio…

This is intended to be a thread that is a guide for folks on how to act and post on SFN. Contents i. General Information ii. Replying to Threads iii. Posting New Threads I. General Information Know the Rules Read the rules before you post. Grammar and Punctuation Please try to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation when you post. It is much easier to understand a post when it is not full of run-on sentences and such. Sure, this may add a few seconds to the time it takes to post, but are you in that much of a hurry? If English is not your native language, and you don't have good grammar, that's f…

In previous threads, staff have mentioned that we have on occasion curtailed or removed the ability for people to use the reputation system. In previous versions of the forum software we were able to limit positive or negative reputation limits separately. This meant that the impact of people who wished to use the reputation system to target specific members was always low, and staff could easily reverse it. This no longer being the case means that the system is more open to being abused by people wishing to use it as a form of personal attack. Thankfully, we have had very few cases where staff have had to intervene. For those cases where we have had to do something,…

The staff have noticed an uptick in spam messages being sent by the Personal Messenger system; this is not being tolerated and any member sending unsolicited links or adverts via the PM system risks being immediately Spam-banned. Could we please ask any member who receives an unsolicited PM which is at all spammy to report that message. Below any incoming message Members should see an option to Report (next to Reply button). A single word Spam in the report will suffice - Staff will then be able to investigate and act. The price of keeping our forum spam free is

We've been having some discussions and have concluded that URL shorteners aren't consistent with a good user experience; too often they mask a spammer's attempt to get you to visit a (possibly malicious) site that you wouldn't be inclined to visit if you could see the actual link. So: don't use them here. We have no post-length limits that might justify them. We will assume that new people using them are spammers and react accordingly. If you have a track record, we'll delete the link and give you a chance to modify your habits.

As discussed in this thread, please consider whether a post to a video link is a violation of our rule against soapboxing. To reiterate the main points there: We are NOT banning videos outright. This will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to see if they violate the spirit (or letter) of rule #8 "Preaching and "soap-boxing" (making topics or posts without inviting, or even rejecting, open discussion) are not allowed. This is a discussion forum, not your personal lecture hall. Discuss points, don't just repeat them." Basically what this is announcing that we've decided that, as an example, a 30 min video posted by itself, to make or rebut a point in a threa…

I know it's a bit late, but I thought I should probably mention something about this at least. Also, I'm pretty useless at this sort of thing, but I thought I should give it ago. As you probably know, we passed the 200,000 post mark about 2 weeks ago. Personally, I think it's a magnificent milestone for SFN, but I'll leave the talking to blike when he gets around to posting here. My thanks to everybody that's contributed to SFN, taken time to post and contribute to the community. This place wouldn't be the same without it, and the more people we get here, the better it will get. I don't know any other place that has such a great atmosphere in helping others and discus…

All right. Now that that's settled. 25,000 posts is a major milestone, and deserves a detailed look at the sites progress. Posting trends: In 2002, 4489 posts were made at an average rate of 25.8 per day. In 2003, 20,512 posts were made at an average of 66.38 per day (1986 posts per month. we had 1 week with 1004 posts, which was the best). Looking back through the year, the post count averages continue to increase and we can expect 30,000 posts before the Spring semester of college ends. User trends: In 2002, a total of 145 people joined the site for an average of 24.17 per month. In 2003, 661 members have joined for an average of 66.1 new users per mont…

Wow. By far the record. This far surpassed the old 208. Great job everyone, let's keep it up!

Yesterday was the largest amount of posts on a single day in all ScienceForums history, and also only the 2nd time we broke 300 in a day. The previous record was 318 on January 23rd, 2003. Lets keep it up

haha i win Thanks to everyone who's helped make this community great, keep it up

I've been digging through our site statistics lately and I thought I'd reveal a few tantalizing details. In the past year, SFN has had over 1,000,000 unique visitors. They have made a combined total of over 3,300,000 page views, and downloaded almost 150 GB of content each month. The past year has seen over 70,000 new posts and over 10,500 new threads. Just a month ago, we set a record of 199 users online at once. And earlier this year, we broke 500,000 posts! Great job, everyone. SFN is becoming a bigger and better community for everyone. Let's hope the next year is even better.

A friendly reminder to our newer members to please read the rules and etiquette guide in case haven't already done so. Older members may also wish to review them, in case you missed any announcements about small modifications we've made.

Ever since 2006, SFN has longed to have its philosophy and religion section back. We closed P&R because of the tension and anger that flowed through the forum, but now we're bring it back, with new rules and new ideas to keep discussions going strong. It's an experiment, however, so the forums are subject to change. If we discover they should be rearranged, or removed altogether, we'll willingly do so. Your feedback and your cooperation in keeping them going well are welcome. Head over to look! http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=162 The rules are simple, and designed to prevent the heated discussions that destroyed our previous forums. A…

We have made an addition to the forum rules following a recent incident in which one member quoted another, deliberately altered their quote, and went on to respond as though they were their actual words. This is clearly unacceptable, and we have adjusted rule 2.2 to reflect this. Violations of this new term will be enforced as per any other infraction.

I'm now Internet-famous! I was recently approached for an interview by a blogger publishing interviews of science and technology related people, and it's now published: http://thefastperfectionist.blogspot.com/2011/11/interview-with-admin-of-science-forums.html On that note, I'll open this thread up for questions. Want to know about SFN's history or how it's run? Fire away.

Welcome to the new SFN! With our major upgrade comes many new features. Follow along as we walk through the best of them. Click on the images to see full-size versions! The SFN Chatroom Want to shoot the breeze with SFN members in real time? Feel like a little informal discussion after your major debate on the merits of loop quantum gravity? Find the Chat tab on the top of the page and dive in. Just by glancing at the top of the page, you can see how many members are currently online; click the tab and you'll be introduced to our new web-based chat client -- no super-slow Java applets required. Just type your thoughts into the box at the bottom and cha…

Some of you may recall that once upon a time we had the idea of doing interviews with prominent scientists and members of the community (see here). For one reason or another, we seemed to stop after the first one - until now! We have been very fortunate to have Professor Lawrence Krauss agree to do a small Q & A for us. Krauss, for those who aren't aware, is a highly regarded cosmologist and theoretical physicist, professor and director of the Origins project at Arizona State. In addition to his own work, Krauss is also a prominent and outspoken advocate of science and has authored a few bestsellers, namely The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing (for mo…

Many of you are familiar with the SFN Blogs, which we set up back in 2008 to offer a free WordPress blog to every interested SFN member. Some of our bloggers became quite prolific -- swansont reached nearly 5,000 posts, with ajb trailing at nearly 500 -- but the blogging system eventually languished, failing to receive security updates or maintenance. Today, in response to some security issues I feared may be related to our five-year-old (!) WordPress version, I upgraded the blogs system to WordPress 4.4 and migrated our most-active blogs to the latest version. This update brings many new features to WordPress: new themes, an improved dashboard, easier embedding o…

In our ongoing effort to control the minds of intelligent people everywhere, we have opened the SFN Brain Challenges forum to all. Brain Challenges will be moderately difficult (but not too difficult) questions that should be fun and interesting. The first person to answer the question correctly will win the user title "Ubernerd" and a free cookie once the next challenge is announced (that means that you will not know immediately if your answer is correct, allowing others to try as well). For more information, check out this thread.

All right folks, I've been getting this together for a while now and I think it's ready for the public to take a look at. Long long ago, blike created a wiki called OpenScience for SFN users to fill up with scientific encyclopedia entries. It died off quickly (webhost didn't want the extra database) but now that SFN is larger, we've decided to try again. And this time, it's named WiSci. I'm asking all of you users to come and help make new articles at http://www.wisci.org. Be sure to read through the style standards and such (linked on the main page) before writing an article, of course. I'd also like a few users to help creating the policy and some templates …