Forum Announcements

On a whim, I've made a new Experimental style (available in the switcher at the bottom left of every page) that I will be testing some new ideas and features in while trying to make vBulletin less bad. The first change to appear in Experimental is a new, sleek thread listing style. Hit New Posts and you'll see the difference{ the forum each thread is from is listed underneath its title rather than on on the far right, freeing up some horizontal space for long thread titles and making it easier to tell where threads came from. And I've eliminated the annoying thread icon column to make the most of our horizontal space. If you have any comments or suggestions on the…

It has come to the attention of the Administrators that some users, staff included, are making inappropriate or inadvisable use of the Private Message system. Grievances with Staff Members If you have a grievance with a particular member of staff, you are quite right to try and reconcile your differences by approaching them with a PM. However, if this approach fails, you need to raise the matter with myself (or another administrator if you are not happy talking to me) instead of being drawn into a protracted argument. We now have a strict and effective policy in place which staff have to abide by, and the policy is very clear about what is and is not accept…

Welcome to the SFN Newsletter for 2008-2009! This is a new feature that we are running for new and old members alike. The aim is to take a look back at the past year and all the changes and notable events that occurred in it. Contents: Traffic and Usage New Staff Members User Awards Recent Forum Changes Upcoming Changes Forgotten Features Traffic and Usage: All stats run from January 1st 2008 to December 31st 2008. We gained on average a steady 350 new members each month up until August, with a sudden leap to 450 in September which was the record month for the past year. The level of member activity has remained between about 90…

Over the past few months, we've recognized that there's a need for SFN to have a clear and simple policy for moderators to follow while doing their jobs on the forums. After a bit of discussion, the policy has gone into effect. The key points of our new policy: Moderators shouldn't moderate in threads in which they are participating unless they're doing something like delete blatant spam. If a moderator is participating in a discussion and thinks there's a rule violation, he or she will simply report the post and ask for feedback from the rest of the staff. Only after discussion will action be taken. Reported posts take new importance. We've revamped the way …

If you're new to SFN, please take the time to go to our Official "Introduce Yourself" Thread and give us a bit of information about yourself. We'll enjoy our discussions with you more if we know more about you.

Hi guys, I know that this won't concern a lot of you (unless you happen to run your own vBulletin forums), but I'm releasing the plugin that displays the lovely LaTeX scripting into the wild. I know some people are interested in this, hence the announcement. You can grab it here, but be warned it's still quite beta and liable to break!

The SFN staff have been contemplating a number of changes to take the forums forward and we want your input on a couple of things. Forum front page It's generally felt that the layout might be a bit long and cluttered for people to get through. So we're proposing to condense the front page: take a look at the attachment at the bottom of this post, and tell us what you think of the potential layout. Homework Help Our proposal is to remove Homework Help entirely, and let members ask homework questions anywhere. My own personal feeling is that this will help members to post more, and attract more people into the forums. What do you think? Please use the t…

This is a mirror image of this thread. However, I feel it needs a palce in the announcements forum, so here we go. You can find a nice, easy guide to getting online on IRC at the following link: http://www.scienceforums.net/extras/irc.pdf Please give it a go! The more people we get on there, the more fun we can have! Cheers.

As said before, if you're reading this, you're on the new server! Let us know of any problems in the suggestions and comments forum.

This must be the first time in a while I've posted any kind of announcement, but at least I have good news! Well, there's a bit of bad news as well, but it pales in comparison to the good. The bad news is: SFN will be down anywhere between a couple hours and a day. The good news: we're going to be moving to a much faster dedicated server. Hopefully, this will make browsing the site an order of magnitude faster and will be provide us with a bit more breathing room in terms of resources. Now, we have no certain date that this will happen yet as I'm still to get the server shipped down to the data centre. However, I do anticipate that it will arrive on Thursday. The …

SFN has been upgraded to the latest and greatest version of vBulletin. There are loads of new and shiny features (have fun finding them), and there may be a few lingering problems as we get over the upgrade. If you spot any, post them here so we can sort them out. Hope you enjoy the newer SFN.

Yesterday SFN passed 400,000 posts. We've effectively doubled our number of posts since September 2005. Our post rate is going up and we've got plenty of new members -- in fact, we recently passed 10,000 members. I think this milestone is a cause for celebration. Good work, everyone, and let's hope we can double our postcount yet again in another three years. (Go exponential growth!)

In the coming days I will be upgrading the SFN blogs from WordPress MU 1.3 to WPMU 1.5.1. This will require me to take down the blogs for at least half an hour. If you're interested in seeing what will come with the new WordPress, take a look at the WordPress announcement of version 2.5 (which corresponds to WPMU version 1.5) listing all the new features and fanciness. The biggest new features are a redesigned blog admin area and support for photo galleries in posts. I will, of course, be taking full backups before I perform the upgrade. Hope everyone enjoys the new features!

Sorry about the mysterious disappearance of SFN from the Internet yesterday. It seems our provider switched our IP addresses with very little warning (or we missed the warning), meaning that visitors to SFN weren't actually connecting to our server. Oops. We've corrected the problem as best we can, and everything should be normal soon. Hope the withdrawal shock didn't kill you.

Today the SFN forum rules have been updated to include a new rule: This has been our policy for some time, but it has never been directly stated in the rules. The entire forum rules announcement can be read here: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/announcement.php?f=51&a=14

After weeks of painstaking work constructing an entirely new front page layout and hours developing code to run the page, SFN is proud to unleash its all-new front page for mass consumption. The page ties together all aspects of SFN, featuring the latest blog posts on SFN Blogs, the latest forum posts here at the forum, and numerous other patent-pending features designed just for SFN. We hope that you'll enjoy the new front page and find it more useful than the old. If you have any problems with it, tell us here -- we'll gladly fix the problem and hide any evidence that it ever existed.

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…

A few years ago dave wrote a series of calculus tutorials for the mathematically inclined on SFN, and they were a success for quite a while. After looking back at their success, we've decided to go further. SFN will now be the host of a series of Ground-Up Tutorials (GUTs for short) on various scientific topics, ranging from mathematics to evolution and computer science. We're piloting the first tutorial, an expansion on dave's original tutorials, and plan on adding quite a few more. To do so, however, we'll need some support. We staff do not know everything (though we do pretend at times), so we'd like some volunteers to help contribute material. Our goal is …

A few months ago someone requested that we install some sort of system to help people with LaTeX by providing a handy way of inserting LaTeX symbols into posts. It's here now. Simply reply to a thread (don't use Quick Reply) and click the icon (don't try it with the WYSIWYG editor, though -- it may not work). You should see a box on the right of the screen showing all the LaTeX symbols you can insert into your posts. It'll even insert the [math] tag automatically. Hope this helps everyone.

Today we've added a few more forums to SFN and reorganized the rest. I'll put a summary of our changes here so everybody can see what's new: SFN Book Discussions: By popular request, we've opened a "book discussions" forum for members to discuss a featured book. New books will be chosen on a monthly or bi-monthly basis (basically whenever we feel like it, actually), and we'll be soliciting public suggestions for new books to discuss. Media Discussions: We've also added a forum for the discussion of a featured media clip - anything from a keynote speech to a lecture - also updated on a semi-monthly basis. Again, we will solicit suggestions for clips to host and dis…

Sorry about the slowness and occasional errors you may be experiencing on SFN. Something very strange is happening and I'm still trying to figure it out. Hopefully I'll soon be able to sort out the problem and get things working. (If any of you know why lighttpd may be failing to communicate with PHP over FastCGI, talk to me.)

The SFN User Awards polls are closed and Klaynos would like to announce the results.

I just thought I'd release some statistics I've generated over the past week. I've been having some fun messing with them to see what seems to be popular on SFN, and I thought you all would enjoy the numbers too. Dividing SFN posting over the last month into individual forums, here are the top ten forums for posts on SFN: Politics: 13.1% General Discussion: 12.3% Ecology and the Environment: 7.6% Pseudoscience and Speculations: 6.4% General Physics: 4.6% General Biology: 3.6% Science Education: 3.4% Astronomy and Cosmology: 3.1% Relativity: 2.8% Computer Science: 2.6% Those percents are by post volume, meaning Politics received 13% of all po…

Today, on a whim, I installed a vBulletin plugin called vB Spy that allows you to watch new posts being made as it happens, without having to sit and refresh the New Posts page every five minutes. It even shows snippets of the posts. For your viewing pleasure, here it is: SFN Spy