Forum Announcements

Rule 2.2 has been updated to read (addition in bold) Plagiarism/copyright violation is unacceptable. Paraphrasing is acceptable, but direct copying and passing others' work off as your own thoughts is not. Furthermore, changing what others have written for the purpose of misquotation is equally unacceptable This is meant to apply to willful changes to the material, making it appear that the member said something which they did not. I suppose it's just not obvious that this is dishonest, and as it happens now and again, we've codified it. On occasion, people will change quotes as a form of sarcasm, often with a "FTFY" note. If it is clear (e.g. using …

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.

Just a quick note to say happy holidays from me and all the other staff at SFN -- I sincerely hope you're all having a great break. I'm also going to take the opportunity to replace a failed drive whilst traffic to the site is a bit lower due to the holiday period, so there will be a short amount of downtime tomorrow at around 10:00am GMT (UTC+0).

This weekend -- likely on Saturday afternoon, Eastern time -- we will be upgrading SFN to the latest version of our forum software, IPB. It's a big update, from version 3.6 to 4.1, and will involve big changes to the look and features of SFN. The theme will be upgraded to look better on phones and tablets, the text editor will be upgraded... basically everything will change. Naturally this will involve some disruption. We'll try to minimize it, but SFN will likely be down for a few hours on Saturday afternoon, followed by a period with some bugs and kinks we'll have to work out. As always, you can post here or in the Suggestions, Comments and Support forum if you expe…

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.

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…

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.

Hi all, Apologies, once more, for the downtime today (around the last 6-7 hours). Unfortunately, our server hosts experienced a major power outage this afternoon and the server did not automatically restart when the power came back up. Everything should now be back up, but please let me know if you encounter issues. Dave

Hi all, Apologies for the extended downtime today. It was necessary to do a server upgrade and I choose one of our least busy times -- UK mornings, on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately before I could finish the update I became a bit ill so had to postpone the last parts until later this evening. Everything should be back in order but if not, let me know. Cheers, Dave

Status update has been increasingly misused as of late. It is for short announcements, typically of a personal nature, where you aren't expecting a lengthy conversation, and not for making pronouncements which would be out of bounds if made in posts (e.g. closed topics, complaints about moderation or potshots against science to name three popular subjects that are inappropriate) Multiple post updates suggest you need to blog. If you want substantive responses, it should be a thread on the forums.

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…

SFN now has a Google+ community. Have you ever wanted to have face to face conversations with other members? Now you can with Google Hangouts. Just go to the community page and see if there is a Hangout in progress.

It's been a long, long time since we last nominated resident experts, and we've noticed some new expert faces among the members since then. To help recognize those members who have shown expertise and knowledge on the forums, we've promoted over the past few days five members to Resident Expert status: Bignose - Maths Expert CharonY - Biology Expert D H - Physics Expert hermanntrude - Chemistry Expert Klaynos - Physics Expert lucaspa - Biology Expert On behalf of all the staff here at SFN, I'd like to welcome the new experts to the team, and thank them for their contributions to SFN.

Apologies if you were caught in the ~20 minute outage that came rather suddenly today. There was an important security update that needed to be applied, and whilst there was a lull in activity I decided to capitalise on it! Please let us know in this thread, or in the Suggestions forum, if you encounter any problems.

In order to respond to some security advisories, I will take the server offline at around 9am tomorrow (GMT+1) for approximately 1 hour to perform the necessary updates. During this time SFN will be unavailable. I will post here again once the maintenance is complete.

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…

To install a new piece of hardware, I will need to take the server offline tomorrow morning (25th April) at 10am BST (9am GMT, 5am EDT) for approximately 15 minutes. I will update this thread once the upgrade is complete.

Many apologies to our European visitors for the extended downtime this morning. Unfortunately, our database backup scripts caused us to run out of memory on our machine this morning, making it unresponsive and requiring a power cycle. The subsequent loss of power caused a further delay as the RAID array required resynchronisation. However we are now back online! Clearly, server issues have become quite the problem over the last few months, which is almost entirely due to increasing memory requirements as our forum grows and the software driving it becomes more complex. For various reasons of both practicality and finance, the easiest way to alleviate this problem is t…

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…

We've recently made further clarification to the forum rules to make our policies clearer and more flexible. Here's a summary of the changes: We've clarified our anti-spam rule to say that links relevant to discussion are permitted, and that links to commercial sites in signatures and such are not permitted. You're free to link to your personal blog or Twitter, of course. Our rule on hazardous materials has been updated to give staff greater discretion. Previously the rules allowed posting of procedures for making hazardous materials, so long as the disclosure is legal; now we have given staff discretion to remove posts we believe are a significant danger. For ex…

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.

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.

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…

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…

Today I've upgraded the mathematics support on the SFN Blogs. We now use MathJax to display nicely-typeset equations directly in the browser, rather than generating fuzzy images which didn't always match with your blog themes. The MathJax output should look much, much nicer, and fits in with the surrounding text much better. Your previous equations should already work perfectly with MathJax. In future posts, you can take advantage of new features, like using the LaTeX syntax for display equations: \[ x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a} \] to get display-size nicely-typeset equations. For mathematics within a paragraph, you can still use the $latex x^2$ synt…