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)

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 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.

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…

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

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…

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

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,…

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.

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…

The SFN staff are proud to announce the opening of ScienceForums.net Blogs, a blogging system that will allow members of SFN to run a (free) science-related blog hosted by SFN. The blog system is fully integrated with SFN, so all current members with more than 50 posts and one month of membership on SFN can sign up for a blog. Simply head over to the signup page and decide what you'd like to call your blog. Please note that blogs hosted on SFN are to be science-related; that means that a majority of your posts must be on some science-related subject. That could be anything from what you did in the lab today to what you think about some new science development. Don…

Unfortunately our domain name registration happened to expire on Wednesday, causing us to go down for about a day until the, uh, responsible party could be hunted down politely asked to renew the domain. We should be back now, though you may find it takes a few hours before different ISPs catch up and start letting you access the site. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Hi everyone, We've upgraded SFN to version 4.1 of our forum software, and things are looking good so far. Take a look around and enjoy the new features, and post here if you experience any weird problems. Some things to note: You may enjoy the new Activity stream, showing everything that's happening on SFN in real time (the page automatically updates). There are some minor updates to the LaTeX rendering we now use, which are detailed in an updated thread in the maths forums. The search system and "Unread Content" button may not work correctly for a day or so -- the system has to reindex all the posts and topics, so search results won't be correct. …

Congrats to Klaynos and Mooeypoo on becoming super mods. Good picks.

You will probably have noticed that following a couple of hours upgrading, we have successfully upgraded to the latest version of our forum software. The reasons for upgrading are pretty numerous and there are some nice new features, including changes to make the editor easier to use, improvements to the search engine and some performance enhancements. However, we hope that by far the most marked impact will be a reduction in spam messages throughout the forum. One thing that you will almost certainly have noticed is that the site is looking quite a bit different! Unfortunately the changes to themes have meant that we have had to remove quite a lot of our customisatio…

Note: if you enjoy this interview, feel free to vote for us on reddit! Well, the questions have been sent, and Mr. Comfort has sent back his answers in record time. Due to the interview's length, and the tendency of Internet audiences to skip over long texts, here's a summarized list of the questions, so you can find what you're interested in. I do encourage you to read the entire interview, however, as it's interesting as a whole. In particular, Mr. Comfort's answers to questions 8, 9 and 10 may surprise you. Why did you feel the need to shift to taking on evolution? What brought about this shift? Before the publication of your edition of On the Origin o…

Welcome to the new SFN! Let us know if you have any problems here. If you can't log in, email staff at scienceforums.net.

As some of you have noticed recently, we now have a user reputation system enabled on SFN. We hope that the reputation system will help improve the quality of posts on SFN, and encourage people to make better posts in the future. At the bottom of each of your posts (but not those of anyone else) you will see a small icon indicating the number of reputation points you have (the more, the better). You can give someone reputation points by using the small icon in the corner of their posts (). Please note that the reputation system only allows you to give positive reputation - thus, it's more of a "thank you" button for helpful posts. We're not sure if we should allow…

Times of change are upon us! In the coming months, SFN is going to be making the transition from vBulletin forum software to IPB, which we believe is a superior system with greater potential for further development and improvement. There's still work to be done to facilitate the transition, but we're gradually working on it and should be ready when IPB 3.1 is released. However, there's something we need from the community. We need a new logo! Our current logo will not fit in with the IPB design, so we need some modification of it or a completely new logo. If you're an avid Photoshopper, try making us a new logo! Here's how the contest will work: Create …

Choose your favorite logo of those submitted in the SFN Logo Contest! The winning logo will be used when we make the transition to new forum software in the coming months, and will be featured on upcoming SFN merchandise! Note that these images don't necessarily reflect the final color or layout -- the large images will of course be adjusted to fit in the page, and so on. We may tweak the winning logo to best fit in SFN after it's selected, of course. Choice 1: Biohazard Choice 2: SFN Integral Choice 3: The Brain Choice 4: Exponentially Awesome Choice 5: Supernova (Hope I didn't miss any!)

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.

As many of you have read, we're going to open a separate forum on a separate domain for philosophy and religion. Why? 1) Moderators are spending way too much time (capn mentioned 7/10 reported posts) sorting out who said what and why in the philosophy and religion forums. 2) The primary purpose of this site is not to be a philosophy and religion forum, and we are not currently equipped to manage it as such. 3) The moderating team here (and the admins) are largely uninterested in trying to manage it as such. We are a science forum--that's it. There is no perfect solution. So what we decided to do was to split the sites, but keep the same usernames/passwords. E…

Yes, that's right, today is the tenth birthday of SFN's founding on July 4th, 2002. Since then we've had almost 670,000 posts, 50,000 members, and 1.3 gigabytes of posts and private messages. Happy birthday to SFN, and thanks to all the members and staff that have helped it last this long.

I've not plugged IRC in a long, long time. However, I've spent a couple of hours today implementing a cool new feature, one which I hope will attract some more of you on there! For those that don't know; we do have an IRC chatroom for real-time science chats (sometimes) and general miscellaneous conversation. Some of the moderators and administrators can be found on there, and so if you need instant feedback it could be useful to visit. To access the IRC chat, just click the SFN Chatroom link on the navigation bar at the top of the page, next the User CP link. Anyway, the cool new feature of the day is featured at the bottom of the forum homepage. If you scroll d…

Dear all, We received notification from Google a few hours ago that some malware had been injected into some of our forum pages, leading to a warning being displayed whenever SFN is listed in Google search results. Both myself and Capn have investigated this issue and have found no evidence of this so far -- it may be the result of an IP.Board vulnerability that we have just patched. Additionally, we have checked servers and done our best to ensure the site is safe. The issue has been bounced back to Google, and hopefully this should be resolved within the next few hours or days. I will post again once we have received an update.