Forum Announcements

It's been pointed out that we have a bit of a conundrum regarding recurring topics: many people hate thread necromancy, but also repeating themselves in topics that keep cropping up. So here's a chance to post your favorite links and also (especially) discussions here on SFN on recurring topics. These can be debunking zombie arguments (the ones that won't die) such as creationism/evidence for evolution, perpetual motion, WTC, zero-energy, climate change, relativity, or simply topics that continue to crop up, like quantum entanglement/teleportation. Please be as specific as you can describing the link you provide, because there will be a lot more copy/paste going on…

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.

Want to share the nerdly goodness of ScienceForums.Net with your Facebook friends? Go right ahead! As of today, it's now possible to connect your SFN profile with your Facebook and Twitter profiles -- and if you haven't yet registered on SFN, you can use Facebook Connect or your Twitter account to sign up in half the time. If you'd like to try it out, head over to your Facebook Connect settings or Twitter Connect settings and follow the instructions. After a few steps, you'll be able to connect your SFN profile to your Facebook or Twitter profile: Note that all these features are optional, and you can turn them off if you'd like. Either way, you'll be able to…

The requirement that members have 30 posts before participating in Politics, Religion or Philosophy has been lifted, as we believe it was stifling discussion while not substantially benefiting those forums. All members should now be able to participate in those forums. Please be aware, however, that we can revoke a member's access to those forums if they are abusive or persistently violate the rules. You can help us prevent trouble by proactively reporting posts you think violate the rules -- just use the "Report" button under the post and a staff member will review it. We strive to build a forum where members can productively discuss difficult topics without fear of …

Well, I never thought the day would come that I'd be writing my last goodbyes from SFN. The past few months of my life have been times of great change, and for better or worse, that change has spread to SFN. Beginning in just a few weeks I'll be moving to Clearwater, Florida to train to become an Operating Thetan. After my recent conversion to Scientology, I have given ownership of SFN to the Church of Scientology so that they may use its vast public reach to clear negative engrams from people around the world, and to spread the word of Scientology and Dianetics far and wide. Beginning next Monday, SFN will become ScientologyForums.Net. We'll largely keep the curr…

This may be a little late for an announcement (a few people have noticed this already), but the Politics forum is now closed to members with less than 30 posts who have been registered for less than one month. The restriction is designed to help keep idiots out of Politics while keeping discussion of generally good quality. We certainly hope you've joined SFN for the science anyway, not the politics section.

A new science blog aggregator was announced at the recent Science Online 2011 conference (which was a lot of fun). Science Seeker http://scienceblogging.org/2011/01/15/introducing-scienceseeker/ Go to http://scienceseeker.org/ and click on "submit your blog" and fill out the information. Since we have a combined feed for the RSS ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/sfn-blogs ), you will also have to point to your own posts, so they can be sorted, so you should have a recent post in the feed. Once your blog is accepted into the system (takes about 24 hours) they should show up in whatever category you have put your blog in, and you may get some more visits. I already …

Brief notice: Section 5 of the ScienceForums.Net Forum Rules has been updated to more clearly describe the ownership and use of content on SFN. If you have any questions, send them my way.

Today I went ahead and upgraded our WordPress blogs to 3.0. This brings an assortment of new features, like a new default theme, custom backgrounds, custom post types, and all sorts of other junk. You may find that some of your plugins don't work with this version; I know Firestats seems to be broken. If this is the case, please disable them in your Plugins page and let me know so I can find replacements. If you encounter any other bugs let me know. Also, for those of you particularly technologically inclined, you can nag me about bugs on Twitter instead.

Hi all, We've had a notification from our data centre that they need to kill power to our server (amongst others) to repair some of the systems. As a result of this, SFN will be unavailable on 2nd October from 00:00 to 08:00 GMT+1 (17:00-03:00 EDT). Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this might cause. Dave

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…

On Monday, July 12th, ScienceForums.Net will be unavailable from approximately 5pm to 9pm GMT, or 12pm to 4pm ET. During that time, we'll be upgrading the server's operating system and converting SFN to use a brand new forum software -- expect big changes! During that time, we invite you to join us in the SFN chatroom, which will stay online for the duration of the upgrade. Please do not panic.

The SFN Logo Contest voting period is now over, and the members have spoken? (Well, not "spoken," more like "pressed a button." But you know what I mean.) The winner is: Of course, that's not the final version -- we'll be tweaking and updating the design to make it as best as we can before we start using it. Now, since mooeypoo designed the logo and I contributed the idea, we're clearly not just awarding all the free shirts to ourselves. To keep in the spirit of things, toastywombel and tomgwyther will be awarded free SFN shirts, for their participation and effort in the logo contest! I'll be getting in contact with both once we have shirts designed a…

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…

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!)

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 …

The evangelical author Ray Comfort, famous for releasing a new edition of On the Origin of Species with a 50-page introduction denying evolution and linking Darwin to Hitler, has agreed to be interviewed by SFN. We need some questions, of course, so what non-evolution-related questions do you have for Mr. Comfort? (I don't want more evolution questions because he's already done the topic to death in previous interviews, in the book, and pretty much everywhere.) You can learn more about Comfort at his website and on Wikipedia. Questions on the relation between science and religion and so on are fair game, but I don't want to just ask a bunch of "What about reas…

Dr. Steve O'Shea, director of the Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute and noted giant squid expert, has kindly agreed to be interviewed by SFN. Just take a look at the articles linked - O'Shea is a giant squid expert and creator of the Squidcam, a live site for watching giant squid in captivity. Have a question for Dr. O'Shea? Want to know more about giant squid, squid research, or the work of the Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute? Post your questions here, and we'll collate the best ten or so questions to be emailed to Dr. O'Shea. Then we'll post his responses. So, off you go. What would you ask Dr. O'Shea?

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.

Recently it has come to our attention that SFN has not had an official privacy policy for several years, which we think is generally unwise with the current legal climate. Thus, we've gotten together and drafted a new policy that should address any concerns. This policy is available as part of the SFN Forum Rules: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/announcement.php?f=51&a=14 While updating the rules, I have also changed them to reflect the fact that SFN is now hosted in the United Kingdom, and is thus subject to the UK's laws. For your convenience, our new policy is also printed here: If you have any questions regarding the privacy policy, you can…

We've heard dozens of requests for it, so it's finally here. SFN now has an Earth science forum. Enjoy! If there are any threads you believe should be moved into it, feel free to use the Report Post mechanism to let us know.

Unfortunately our webhost has been suffering from catastrophic network issues for the past day or so*. We're back up temporarily, but I don't know how long this will last. The hosts are not being very communicative about what is going on and whether things will be completely fixed any time soon. So hang in there. Ideally they'll solve this sometime soon and SFN will be back to its usual busy self. * This is a euphemism for "Dave spilled his Guinness on the server."

(This message brought to you from Klaynos, master of the SFN User Awards.) The results from the polls are now in. Congratulations to our winners: Most Helpful Member: insane_alien and iNow Most Improved Member: iNow Most Enjoyable Member: yourdadonapogos Best Debater: mooeypoo Most Interesting Member: Bascule Most Knowledgable Member: Lucaspa Favourite IRC Chatter: mooeypoo A draw now that's never happened before! Thanks for taking part everyone, hopefully this'll be done again in about a year... And maybe the staff will do something for the winners... Klaynos

The award season is upon us! Please use the linked thread to nominate and read the rules. When the nominations close (8th August 2009) the threads for voting will be posted IN THIS THREAD. Thank you and happy nominations!

I've just opened up a Science News Forum here on SFN. We've observed for a long time that there's no good place to put new research and development discussion on SFN, so here's your chance. Minor disclaimer: Please do not just copy-and-paste entire articles and post them on SFN. We don't want copyright lawyers chasing after us. You can use a short quote or two, and perhaps write a summary yourself, and then provide the link.