Suggestions, Comments and Support

Just wondering, is there anyway to change your username? Or am I stuck with this one ?

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?

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

Lately I have been finding the forum is behaving strangely. I am missing the names on the tops of people's posts and the avatars are in a funny place. Any idea what is wrong? Edit: Hmm - seems to be a problem with "SFN" style setting since "--SFN Blue" works fine.

I receieved an apology from Truedeity. The nature of the apology is not important, howsoever, the conversation between us i feel is important to help me understand the true nature of this forum. The reply went a bit like this: ''That's truely ok. I accept your apology -- i just want you to be more aware of what others might be saying here. But that may derogatory, because right now i am having my own displeasure with people here continuously asking me to back up the scientific claims here i make with some kind of evidence, and this gets tiring. It's impossible to qoute everything one ever learns in this place. If it was possible, one would need a record of everth…

On this Forum, it is well known & openly declared that freedom of speech does not exist. Is it legal? I had a look at the wikipedia article about freedom of speech in which it is mentioned that: "The right to freedom of speech is recognized as a human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and recognized in international human rights law in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The ICCPR recognizes the right to freedom of speech as "the right to hold opinions without interference. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression."[1][2] Furthermore freedom of speech is recognized in European, inte…

Hello Swansont; This question has been bothering me for a while now, and I would have rather addressed it in a PM, but you stated that it should be addressed here--so here I am. While posting in the Speculations forum, I gave what I thought to be some very good advice for philosophers, who post in a Science forum, as follows: You responded with the following: The problem is that I don't think that my tactics earned me warnings--my temper did. This was when I did not have any tactics to solve the problem, so I fell back on simple manners. Which just encouraged the problem, so I hit the report button. The moderator's "help" is what actually blew my…

What do you need to do in order to be a mod?

referring to http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/88515-how-to-calculate-the-force-of-gravitational-attraction-in-co-orbiting-planets/page-2#entry862974and the post above it. How did that sentence get into my post?

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 …

I've noticed a consistent trend of threads dragging for about 300-400 posts, then people start getting annoyed and mods start insisting for some substantive evidence. None is forthcoming, and then quickly follows some mardy exchanges, resulting in closure. Might it be a good idea for the mods to intervene much sooner, say 100 posts? I think this is more than ample to ascertain the direction and usefulness of a thread. I think the mods would not be out of order, if there is a consensus between them, to 'knock a thread on the head' because it's clearly pointless with no productive outcome. I like this forum because of it's relative freedom, but I do think a line needs …

I'm sorry to need to post this but it seems we are enjoined to give time wasters what is, in my opinion. excessive rope. I put a deal of thought and effort into trying to offer help, at an appropriate level to one such who was a self confessd novice at science. After several tap dancing replies to my moderately lengthy explanations, I was beginning to smell a rat when this person decided to no only question what was being said, but also expound his own gospel of the laws of physics something he had already said he knew little or nothing about, all the while carefully ignoring simply prepared explanations, just for him. What other behaviour would this sugges…

Just wondering...

I think that moderators suppress discussion on some things because they are unorthodox, I think that this forum suppresses your right of free speech. I believe in Timecube and I understand it, and moderators here are inexperienced with Timecube--they don't know anything about it, they haven't gave it a chance, and they call it stupid, like children, blocking it off from the rest of us. We cannot discuss it and give it true reconciliation because the moderators suppress our right to, just because we might prove them false, on the offhand. Some things may be hidden from you to keep you submissive... -wisdom.

If no one feels offended or angry or threatened by evobulgarevo -- a masquerade that some unoffendable members seem determined to uphold -- I'm wondering how to explain his ever-growing and prodigious pile of -1 you're-a-bad-boy rep points, which, although hasn't yet attained the dizzying heights of my own, is beginning to cause me some concern over the possibility of being usurped from the diabolical throne. Just a few words to the rotten new kid on the block then... I had to go through exactly the same song-and-terpsichore when I first joined the site a couple of months ago, evo. A significant number of our members ARE -- and never mind their denials to the con…

Why am I banned, for simply repeating the exact same insults a horde of bullies has continuously directed at me? In fact, I actually said less insults than they said to me. It's a rhetorical question. Of course I know why I was banned. I was banned because I am an outsider of the group, and humans are dominated by xenophobia and their ancient emotional associations to desire conformity. Thus I was given a bias and banned, whilst others broke more rules than me, and got no punishment. And don't even say it was because I didn't follow the scientific method. You had guys who made ridiculous unscientific claims like "animals are not sentient" and didn't ban them for …

Hello guys, So, a lot of my time is spent reading about history, studying it, writing about it, etc. And I mean a vast majority of my time. And while I know this is a science forum, I feel that if we can have a politics section, which arguably has less to do with science and politics then it does with pure politics at this moment, it wouldn't overly hurt us to have a history section. Would anyone else agree that having a section open about history would be good as well? I mean the same basic rules could apply. You have to have evidence, you have to list sources, you can't preach, etc. Just my personal suggestion and I'm curious what other's on this for…

Got this in my email: First, I saw this joke from TheVat from this thread: I thought his squirrel joke was funny, so I laughed at it with a squirrel image macro: ..................and somehow that was "TROLLING." Now I don't know which windmill who was tilting at and I frankly don't give a flip, but unless someone was using some obscure meaning of the term "TROLLING" that I was (as still am) utterly unfamiliar with, there was no "TROLLING." Laughing at someone's joke isn't "TROLLING," and I've no idea where this nonsensical "rebellion" label came from either (again, don't know what they're on about, and don't care ei…

Took me a couple tries to just post this. On the brain/protein thread I couldn't post at all. Sometimes the text box wouldn't open or the quote selection feature would refuse to work. Seemed to relate to drop-down ads atop the page that would freeze all activity until I closed them, but sometimes not. And of course there seems to be a new and aggressive wave of full page blocking ads, a lot of them seem to want me to join a popular service that rhymes with snick-snock (don't want to inflame them further by including actual name).

I was going to post this in "Comments on moderation" but since that is a locked thread there can be no discussion. So it's here, so that there can be a conversation, if anyone desires that. Every so often we will get a reported post with a comment along the lines of "This person is wrong. You mods should do something about that" That's not what we do. Moderation, as we practice it, does not include evaluating the correctness of someone's response; if a moderator is posting about the material itself and in a position to evaluate the content, s/he is not acting as a moderator. (Posts in Speculations is possibly an exception, where these roles can be combined, mostly…

Why do I have to be pestered with this cookie nonsense every time I look on the forum now? Surely accepting the cookies once should be enough. And is anyone going to tell us about the changes to the site. Who knows some of them might actually be useful to users.

Is it down, or has it been taken out on purpose through misuse of it?

I remember a while back faf made a thread about how we broke the one day record for posts (300 and something). It was in the announcements where I can't post though so I created a new thread. How many posts are we getting these days? Have we broken the record by any chance?

If anyone is interested, here goes: it is obviously impossible to have a free conversation here. I have witnessed the (alleged) appalling abuse of people here. Einstein would never survive this forum, nor anyone genuinely able to discover hitherto unrecognised secrets of the natural world; so it seems. The problem may partly come from what has happened in the university physics world itself; where ego, status, self-importance, "hero-worship" etc. etc. result in an output of repressed over-subservient-to-authority graduates and under-graduates whose native talents have been firmly squashed. It is very sad. The only way to rescue this forum, is to make it fa…

remember all that time ago when we hit 100,000 posts? i mean, this is the post so anway, blike was going to instal the arcade section again... but it never happened... i know that we've just had a server upgrade so it might have been a bad time to do it, but now that's done what's happening? i accept that latex and the 4xx (404, 403 etc) errors are initially more important, but i can ask!