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The results from the polls are now in. Congratulations to our winners: Most Helpful Member: 5614 Most Improved Member: yourdadonapogos Most Enjoyable Member: AzurePhoenix Best Debater: In My Memory Most Interesting Member: AzurePhoenix Most Knowledgable Member: Klaynos We'll think of something special to do for these guys And a special congratulation to AzurePhoenix for winning not one, but two awards. To you all; thank you all for taking part! It's been great to see so many great members of the community voting and contributing, and I hope that we can do this in another 12 months time. Cheers

As you may have noticed, SFN has been down for the past two days in some sort of server outage. It wasn't planned maintenance, so I presume it was a problem on the hosting provider's end. Anyway, we're back up now and running as usual Sorry for the inconvenience.

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be forming a dedicated news team to handle the way that the News Forum works and to help improve both the quality and quantity of posts that are available to regular readers. So, for all of you budding reporters, this is your chance! If you want to get more involved with SFN and the way it works, then please sign up. However, please note that although we certainly don't expect anyone to donate all of their free time to this endeavour, you should be fairly committed to writing/sourcing something every week. If you're interested, please look at the News Forum thread in the Suggestions/Comments forum and post your name there. We'l…

All right folks, I've been getting this together for a while now and I think it's ready for the public to take a look at. Long long ago, blike created a wiki called OpenScience for SFN users to fill up with scientific encyclopedia entries. It died off quickly (webhost didn't want the extra database) but now that SFN is larger, we've decided to try again. And this time, it's named WiSci. I'm asking all of you users to come and help make new articles at http://www.wisci.org. Be sure to read through the style standards and such (linked on the main page) before writing an article, of course. I'd also like a few users to help creating the policy and some templates …

You might have noticed some changes to the layout of the boards. Primarily, it's been done to try and compact down the front page to make everything more accessible. However, you might all think otherwise, so please leave all your feedback here on what you think. Also, constructive criticism only, please Posts like "OMG YOU SUCK" just don't help anybody.

We're currently having a number of server issues (you might have noticed the slowness). I'm looking into the problem at the moment, and hopefully I'll be able to get back and give you all some answers fairly soon. Until then, I can only apologise for the slow response when posting and general browsing. Hopefully this should start to pick up in the next 3-4 hours.

You may have noticed the new "Speculations" forum at the bottom of the page. It should be fairly obvious to you all as to what that forum is all about, but I'll state it just to be sure. There have been lots and lots of speculative theories posted in the Physics section of the forums. For the most part, these are completely and utterly wrong, and generally it annoys a lot of people. So, to alleviate the pressure, this forum has been created for people who want to post theories that have little or no base in scientific knowledge. If you want to post a new theory, or indeed respond to an existing one, then please read the rules of the forum. In particular, note that…

We've now successfully upgraded to vBulletin 3.5. There are many changes, but most of them are behind-the-scenes. I will, however, list the changes you will see from now on: The most obvious is the new AJAX systems. These allow you to post/edit your posts without even reloading the page, and adds to the style of the forum. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's a great feature. LaTeX has been updated to give much quicker rendering times. I'll post more on this in another thread. The style has been updated so that it actually works properly now, loads faster and is generally more efficient. For the moment, those are the only ones I can think of.…

I know it's a bit late, but I thought I should probably mention something about this at least. Also, I'm pretty useless at this sort of thing, but I thought I should give it ago. As you probably know, we passed the 200,000 post mark about 2 weeks ago. Personally, I think it's a magnificent milestone for SFN, but I'll leave the talking to blike when he gets around to posting here. My thanks to everybody that's contributed to SFN, taken time to post and contribute to the community. This place wouldn't be the same without it, and the more people we get here, the better it will get. I don't know any other place that has such a great atmosphere in helping others and discus…

All right. Now that that's settled. 25,000 posts is a major milestone, and deserves a detailed look at the sites progress. Posting trends: In 2002, 4489 posts were made at an average rate of 25.8 per day. In 2003, 20,512 posts were made at an average of 66.38 per day (1986 posts per month. we had 1 week with 1004 posts, which was the best). Looking back through the year, the post count averages continue to increase and we can expect 30,000 posts before the Spring semester of college ends. User trends: In 2002, a total of 145 people joined the site for an average of 24.17 per month. In 2003, 661 members have joined for an average of 66.1 new users per mont…

Just wanted to make sure all of you are aware of the "report post" function we have here. When you report a post, the mods and admins are notified of the post so they can check on it. You can report a post by clicking the icon under the poster's avatar within the post you want to report. It only takes a few seconds. When to report a post: Off-topic replies Threadjacking Flaming / trolling Inappropriate language or topic Spamming Anything you feel needs to be looked at by a moderator

In case you hadn't noticed, the server is running extremely slow. We're aware of this and will be working on it in the next few days. John

You might have noticed that we've changed servers We also have a new style. I'm aware that there's a couple of issues with IE which I'm going to try and resolve soon, but if you notice anything else, then please PM me with your browser information and what the problem is. Until then, you can set the default style back to the old one in the User CP. Enjoy the new style; feedback is much appreciated.

If you've got any recommended science sites, post them here. They'll be a new side-block with the site of the month link, and the member who suggested it.

In a matter of hours from now, blike will be taking the single most important test of his life, the MCAT. GOOD LUCK!!!!!!

Let me know if you have or haven't.

Thanks to our resident php and math genius dave, LaTex is up again. Now you can click the latex image to see the code that generated it.

As some of you have already noticed, we've now introduced a new set of user groups on SFN. "Experts" are members who have contributed a lot to the forums, and have consistently demonstrated rational application of their academic qualifications and/or field experience. The groups that have been created so far are: - Maths Experts, - Chemistry Experts, - Biology Experts, - Physics Experts. The members of all of these groups combined appear on the forum leaders page under the collective heading of "Resident Experts". You will notice that experts have a user title that indicates which group they belong to (e.g. swansont's user title is "Physics Expert")…

Finally got it fixed!

Unfortunately, we had a problem yesterday with the IRC server; it died unexpectedly and took the services down with it. We've got the server back up now, but services haven't been brought back up because of some other problems. Hopefully, they should be back up soon. Sorry for any inconvenience.

I just updated the server software. If you come across any bugs, PM me or post them in this thread.

We would like to get some more useful discussion going, without the distractions of off-topic posts, flaming, gibberish or thread hijacking. Since this is almost impossible to do on a public forum, we put our heads together in the mods' area and came up with a new feature for SFN: Member Projects. What's Involved: Each project will be different. A topic will be set, with a short list of key objectives that need to be achieved as the goal of the project. There will be a subscription period during which time anyone interested in joining the project will be able to register their interest. This will be a bit like in the challenge threads for debates, with the…

Unfortunately (and rather embarassingly for me), IRC seems to have died for some reason. I can't log in remotely, so it looks like it's an issue with the server hardware itself. I don't have any access to that - it's over in US somewhere in a remote data centre - but I'm sure the admins there will get things up and running again shortly(ish). Sorry for any inconvenience.

There is a link at the bottom of forum pages if anyone wants to chip in a dollar or two every once in awhile. All the money will go directly into funding the server. We only accept PayPal at the moment, but others have mentioned that they would prefer other options. I'll have some more available at the end of this month. Donations are voluntary only!

Looks like we're back up again after a period of downtime. Accordingly it was something to do with the server being extortionately bogged down (hence the "server too busy" message spouted by vB). As far as I'm aware the problem's now fixed Will let blike/Sayo post later to confirm this though. Sorry for any inconvenience.