Forum Announcements

Happy holidays from myself and the rest of the SFN staff - I hope you all have a good one, and a great new year!

The threads are now up in the Suggestions/Comments forum, so go and vote now! Everyone (including staff and experts) are allowed vote, so have fun

Sorry for the downtime yesterday; unfortunately a bug in the VPS software used by our provider managed to knock out our primary IP address so the website was inaccessible for quite a few hours yesterday. Hopefully it's been fixed, and shouldn't theoretically happen again.

Note: The 2007 awards are available here. Since there's been a lot of talk about this recently, we're going to try out this entire "user awards" idea and see if it takes off Basically, there are six categories, and for each of these you can nominate one member. After a week, we'll close nominations and then create a poll for each category with the top 5 nominees. Whoever gets the most votes for a particular category wins! So, go along, read the rules and enjoy yourself at the thread in General Discussions!

We have yet again revised the forum policy on SFN, producing a shorter, more concise, and generally more readable version of them that we hope will make things easier on us. Take a quick glance through it so you become familiar with our rules. Here it is: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/announcement.php?f=51&a=14

Just over a year since the last time we got new staff, we've decided to hire another round of moderators. This time around, the lucky winners are Dak and ecoli. Congratulations to the new staff, and a prize goes to the first person to have a post deleted by them!

Hello everybody. We're planning to move SFN to a new, shinier server tomorrow (Thursday) sometime in the afternoon/evening GMT. Downtime should last anywhere from an hour to a day, depending on the time it takes for DNS providers to realize that SFN has moved. Average should be around three hours, I think. The new server should be faster and, most importantly, more reliable. We've made sure everything on it is up-to-date and properly configured, so hopefully things will work when we make the move. I'll try to warn you if we have to postpone the move for any reason. Thanks for the patience. Hopefully we won't have to suffer through any more downtime after t…

Sorry about the style. I accidentally overwrote the old style and I'll need to get the old one back, or a new one installed, before we can switch back. But at least SFN works now. *slaps himself

Downtime and Upgrades Hi guys. Firstly I have to apologise for the large amounts of downtime that we've been suffering, and the beta style which we've had to implement for the time being. With a bit of luck, in the next week or so we will be moving away from our current servers, so hopefully this will be the last significant period of downtime you'll have to endure. The reason for this latest downtime is twofold. Firstly, the forum software needed a security upgrade. Secondly, we've tried to re-organise the forum index in order to make it easier for you all to post. Some forums have disappeared because they were particularly unpopular. However, for the most part, …

From myself and the rest of the staff at SFN, a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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.

Does anyone think we should bring the front page back, or do you prefer it this way?

Yes, that's right, the forums are now open. If you've registered more than month ago here at SFN, you should be able to log in easily there (although people who have changed their passwords recently will have to use the old one). http://www.theologyforums.net

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…

We've been working on getting a separate religion site set up, and I think now is the best time to ask for volunteers. We need people who know theology well to help organize the site, define rules, and begin moderating when the time is right. We will not accept people who have shown bad behavior in the SFN religion section in the past, as we are looking for people who can stabilize a community and make it strong. If you're interested in helping, send me a PM. Please don't be offended if we do not take you; we are looking for only a few individuals at the beginning. If you really want to help and we don't get back to you, just wait until the site is public and star…

Sorry about the downtime for a few days. It seems the domain name managed to expire without anybody noticing. Everything seems to be working now, so go ahead and post away. If you find any lingering problems, go ahead and post a comment.

So, some of you may have noticed some fairly substantial changes over the last few hours, and hopefully in this post I'll try to outline the major changes. We're now running the latest version of vBulletin (3.6.1), but please let me know if you encounter problems as, inevitably, some will crop up. The most obvious change has been the front page - as in, it no longer exists. We decided to take it down since it really isn't required anymore for the site to function properly. We wanted people to be able to come straight to the forums, without getting confused as to what SFN might be about. From now on, you can access SFN through http://www.scienceforums.net/, so remember…

Some questions for all the members here: If you could make a change to SFN, what would it be? What would you change about the front page? What would you remove from SFN? What have you seen on other forums that you think we should have?

No, not the religion forum, the philosophy forum... Many of you cried out when we closed the Philosophy and Religion forums, and so we have taken the first step in bringing those back. We have opened a new Philosophy of Science forum, available here, for all of your philosophical needs. Please note that there are guidelines posted in that forum; those guidelines are subject to change as we observe activity in the forum and see what is needed. Enjoy!

Hello everybody, It's been rather a hectic couple of days here as we've been discussing the state of the forum and doing various upgrades. This thread is intended to give you some idea as to why we decided to close the Philosophy and Religion forum. Foremost, SFN is a science forum. It should be pretty clear by now that in most cases, science and religion just don't mix at all. Myself, the moderators and the other administrators all felt that the presence of a forum about religion in the middle of scientific discussion just wasn't appropriate. On top of this, the debating on religious matters has started to spill over into some of the scientific areas, and this is…

Due to our recent upgrade, the warning points system has been renovated. Warning points are now issued on the following scale: Multiple Posts: 2 points, 7 day expiry Disrespect: 3 points, 7 day expiry Spamming: 4 points, 10 day expiry Advertising: 7 points, 14 day expiry Copyright violation/plagiarism: 10 points, 14 day expiry Inappropriate Profile Content: 10 points, 14 day expiry Flaming: 10 points, 14 day expiry Trolling: 10 points, 14 day expiry Persistent Strawmanning: 12 points, 16 day expiry Repeated Prejudice: 15 points, 21 day expiry HazMat Violation: 15 points, 21 day expiry Once a user reaches 25 points, they are issued a 3-day…

We've posted a fairly comprehensive update to the forum's policy. Thanks to Capn' for putting a substantial amount of work in to get it all up to speed. You can check it out in the stickied threads above.

Hey ho people, it's that blatent IRC plug again This post is a short summary/rip of my earlier post that I made a while ago to help people get onto IRC and get all you science people chatting. There's been a bit of talk in the moderator section about this, and we've decided to use my IRC server for the time being - that is, until something better turns up. For those who know what I'm talking about, here are the connection details: Server: irc.blackcobalt.net (standard port 6667) Channel: #sfn However, for those unfamiliar to IRC, it's not all that complex. Before I say anything else, IRC stands for "Internet Relay Chat", so I think you can work out what its …

As you may have already known, we've formed a news team over a month ago to get traffic through the news forum. And, I'm happy to announce that I'm looking for more members on the news team! The job would require only two things: 1, that you can write well, and 2, that you have good sources to find science news. If you can do both of these, and you have enough time to write just two or three articles a week, then send me a private message and a sample write-up (using the format of articles currently posted in the news forum) and I'll get you into the news team. Thanks!

After some careful deliberation, we've decided to appoint three new moderators to the staff in order to help us out with the current post-frenzy. These, are, in no particular order: Cap'n Refsmmat, In My Memory and woelen. I hope you'll join me in congratulating them I hope you won't give them too hard a time, and congratulations from me for getting the attention of the staff