Suggestions, Comments and Support

These 1-2 minute load times for pages are making the site unusable. I thought maybe it was a temporary problem, but it's been happening consistently for several weeks now.

As I poked around another forum, I noticed something. On that forum, many users get titles from the admin, things like "Top Poster 2003" or "Top Spammer 2003" or even "Top Waffler". I thought maybe it would be nice to spice things up a bit around here by giving out more of them, and not just to bad people. You could give out "Top Psuedoscientist" titles, or perhaps "Mr. Know-It-All". Or, if a user hit a certain amount of posts, he could get a title. A few suggested titles: 1. Swansont should get one, for always knowing the answer. 2. Tesseract, for posting even though he has no clue what the answer is. 3. ExtraSense, for obvious reasons. ("Martian Believer") 4. a…

Is it really always so horrible? Surely there are threads that may have terminated long ago but that a new poster might have a fresh opinion on.

Recently I asked for support from the mod/admin team over systematic application of negative rep by a specific member. Rather than provide that support I was issued a warning by the team. My offense: calling the member an opinionated twat in my final pm to that member before putting them on Ignore. I joined the forum in 2004 while recuperating from a stroke. Thirteen years later I leave. It has brought me an immense amount of satisfaction, until now, to participate in it. My thanks to all of you whom I have interacted with. I shall no doubt miss you.

ta-da, just like that. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/15439-welcome-creationists-to-science-forums-and-debate/ 2nd post near the end. the quoted sentence is unfounded, unscientific, and misleading(as was intended), at best, we'll say it was a mistake. so i followed the rules, reported it. nothing happened. well maybe i should be thankful i was left unscathed? i wasn't, i became the geniua pig for a new forum "feature" of having your posts "inspected" before being posted. i passed the test phase safely, thank god. i also PMed an admin, he rightfully said there's nothing in the forum rules against being wrong, which is strange with all the demands of scient…

Hi administrators, For 3 days I could not reach these forums. As I see no postings telling us what happened, must I assume it was not a problem at science forums itself? I could not connect from my work, and neither from my home. The error suggested that the URL could not be resolved. Was this a local problem? Swiss? European? Or was it really some problem with the URL registration? I was already desparately trying to find somebody I could contact to find out what was going wrong (WHOIS, trying to find out the email address of one of the moderators). SF is one of my daily mental vitamins. Glad to see y'all back again! Eise PS My, lucky enough ver…

hmm seems that the trend of inactivity on this forum is gettin worse, I just checked the number of posts made in the past day and it was an abismal 38. thats a far cry from where it was in april at 400 posts per day.

I'm not trying to become another target for the mods to attack here, but could you "moderators" & some long-term members take it a bit easier on some of the not so scientifically minded individuals that probably just come to these forums to post questions about something... Considering they probably got confused with the term "speculation" and thought it meant you can come into this section to post things that don't have any theories or studies backing them up. I believe they are more so just wanting to post their own "theory" or curious thoughts to the more educated & informed people residing in the forums for their feedback on the particular question... …

Hypervalent threatened to ban me after I posted this in Cornel's "Can science prove God" (Can science prove God or Afterlife.) To me her act is a display of intense personal hatred. Down in the thread, responding to a request for a definition of 'love' I presented: I don't know if bible verses will be allowed here, but probably everyone will have seen posters and greeting cards reading, "Love is kind, patient ..." I'll try this instead: 'Love is that which leads to life.' Then we must define life .. biologists will have an opinion on that, and there will be many different opinions, because there will be staunch atheist biologists who believe …

Why is it that only the Ignorant people are allowed to judge,move topics,give warnings and abuse their power on this site? Everything,well,almost everything of mine has been judged,removed or abused because of lack of an Understanding in the Field. If a person is not Ignorant in a certain Field, how does he/she not have an Understanding of it? And if a person is Ignorant in the Field, why is he/she allowed to remove,judge or abuse without any consequences? I Understand this is "your site" and I have to follow "your rules." "Abusing power will only hurt yourself." Shouldn't a man/woman with the most Knowledge,Wisdom and Understanding be the one judging other…

How do you delete your forum account? I can't find the option anywhere. Thanks.

I think that not only should there be just more experts in general, and not only of a wider variety, but with a much higher standard. I'm not doubting the knowledge of any specific individual, but as a passive observer in many topics, I think that there needs to be more of an effort to bring in more experts who have a Masters degree or higher in every field this site has, because so far I haven't seen an "astronomy" expert or a "psychology" expert, but also need to display a level of maturity such as that they never put in their personal opinion or emotions except in the philosophy, speculation or brain teaser, lounge and politics sections.

Searching doesn't find any useful help on this so how do I post a table here please?

In the other thread on the reputation system there are repeated coments by moderators who are saying that certain comments about moderation is off topic. The purpose of this thread is to breath life into that subject and as such to discuss everything about being a moderator such as whether the forum rules should be construed as applying to them. My opening question is therefore: Is it against the forum rules for a moderator to be rude to a member when they are operating in moderator mode? Are we allowed to disscuss moderation and moderator actions in threads?

It improves things IMO when SFN gets a lot of posts-per-day and also when the posts are high on my subjective quality scale----when they are INFORMED AND RATIONAL. And, in line with the SFN name of "Science Forums and Debate" I tend to think that it increases the energy at the board when there is a lot of informed and rational DISAGREEMENT. I don't like to argue myself (and am extremely bad at it) but I appreciate it when others engage------instead of placidly agreeing with each other all the time. It is entertaining, and it challenges people and brings out their best, to have the sparks fly now and then. Or so I think. ====================== So I was…

I think its generally acknowledged that the quality of the politics forum has gone to hell (a prominent user recently called it, "a waste of bandwidth."), but for those of you who don't know, recent highlights include an allegation that the women's movement was invented by communists and is therefore very bad, a rather unnuanced examination of poverty in the Muslim world, and "Why do men commit so many rape crimes?" (Apparently, women are engaged in a massive conspiracy to increase their power by withholding sex and rapists are retaliating in the only way they can. Someone on the politics forum seriously suggested this) I would suggest that the title of the politics …

In a current thread a member made a lighthearted comment. Another member took exception to it, since it did have a political slant, and asked the first member to keep "the political hogwash" out of the forum as it diluted the quality of the discussion. I posted a suggestion that the member lighten up - a little humour is not out of place here. I don't want to discuss that specific example - it's just what triggered this observation. I think occasional humour in the forum is a good thing. Now, am I right? Is it acceptable, occasionally to inject a pun, a quick, relevant joke, a witty observation, or should we stay objective and humourless at all times?

I notice the moderator hypervalent iodine has closed this thread with this comment: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/95338-race-and-intelligence/?p=922230 There are two points here. That the moderator has deemed responses irrefutable before I could respond, and that the premise of the OP is "ridiculous". The moderator may consider the premise that IQ varies consistently by race to be ridiculous. Unfortunately the entire field of academic psychology does not. There is no debate about this. The only debate is about the cause of the differences. Why would papers discussing this be regularly published in top psychology journals if the premise was ridicul…

Can we make a new section for this and discuss?

Hi, sci-man here and i was just wondering why there isn't a write your own option for your gender when you make your profile. i understand some people might not be appropriate but non the less i still think it would be a good thing to have. is this a good idea or no? answer the poll

How do I show the triangle symbol using latex? For example, I want to write triangle ABC. Thank you.

Me want a t-shirt with me user name and logo on it from SFN. Perhaps me go make my own at cafepress?

Tired of harassment-level ads that constantly drop over the page one is trying to navigate to. Is there a way to get some feedback to @blike and go back to the usual banner ads or other formats one can scroll past? Does anyone really think they're going to sell a product by shoving it in our cyber-faces over and over? I would think there is an inverse relationship between rudeness of ads and sales generated. SFN is better than this. And no, I don't want to change my wifi provider, thanks.

One of the rules we've tried to uphold here at SFN is the "No personal attacks" rule. We want people to feel free to discuss ideas here without fear of being judged personally by them. The consensus has always been that it's certainly possible to have a bad idea without being a bad person. Still, it's difficult to ignore the personal angle when certain words are used. If I use the word "moronic" to describe your idea (hopefully with deeper reasoning and supportive evidence), am I just saying that the idea is stupid and lacks good judgement, or am I saying that's an idea only a moron would have? Same thing with idiotic. Are these words inherently personal? The rea…

The staff has been discussing the uptick in posts that are simply video links, and whether something should be done about this. This is a discussion site, so one of the questions is whether videos actually promote discussion or inhibit it. Is there a difference between videos that start a thread vs ones given in response? Getting the view of the rest of people who view the threads would be useful. My view: I'm not a big fan. A video doesn't afford the opportunity to give it a quick scan to see if is worthy of your attention — the time investment is much greater. It's a poor cousin to the wall-o' text post, which is bad enough, but another issue is when someone…