Suggestions, Comments and Support

I’m an technician class amateur radio operator. But advertising is forbidden on amateur radio. Another rule is that communications can not be encrypted in signal or speech. The exception to advertising is that you can offer radio equipment for sale periodically. I tell you this because I really wanted to use crypto over the airwaves. I have used crypto before, legally on private bands. But back to advertising. We aren’t allowed to advertise on SFN. Can someone point me to the rule book? I don’t mean selling goods or spam ads. But what if you were putting together a team of creatives? Or trying to find fellow hams? Does anyone know if building a team over amateur…

Does the forum software here support the ability to number posts within a thread? If so, wouldn’t it make sense to turn that function on? More than once now have I had to refer back to what someone said earlier on a thread, in a way that just can’t be done easily using the quote function. There are just situations where it is easier to simply refer to a post number (“You made this claim in post #…”). Thoughts?

A lot of people are talking about the ChatGPT project of late, so I decided to try it out for myself, because I was curious. I’ve asked it a lot of technical questions with regards to physics and some other topics, and was pretty impressed how well it was able to answer most of them. However, the AI wasn’t 100% spot-on. At least twice I caught it giving dubious answers - the first one was, with some goodwill, highly misleading; the other one was just flat out wrong. Interestingly, I was able to tell the AI about the wrong answers, and when I asked the same questions again (in a new chat session), it had one of them (not the other one!) corrected. So the moral h…

Not sure why Zapatos wisecrack stays, but mine was just deleted (though it's partially preserved in exchemist's reply). I am not the one posting under two forum names or trolling on their unsupported assertions and apparent psychic knowledge of stone age peoples cognition. If mods are going to start disappearing people's posts, I think that's going to chill discussion here.

I think it would be useful, helpful, and meaningful to have separate counts for positive and negative reactions on a post, rather than their sum. Also, to see lists of users who gave these positive and negative marks.

From a thread: To clarify a few things- The main purpose of the rule is to prevent thread-starters from just posting a link to their site and having that be their contribution to the discussion. This would invite spammy behavior, which we want to discourage. We don’t like links to commercial sites, but that’s primarily sites that are selling things. We are also wary of people repeatedly linking to a particular site, i.e. they are driving traffic there. (i.e. don’t post just to link to Bob’s news aggregator or blog) It’s OK to post links to sites that have info helpful to a discussion. If there is a particularly relevant passage, we encourage you to …

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…

i have no idea.please help me

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…

Because I have problems with my stone age old Ubuntu, and with that, with the installed browsers, I sometimes have to change from Opera to Firefox. I nearly always use Opera, but using Firefox, with my add-ons, I saw there are quite a few trackers on scienceforums: Is this just in the forum software package, i.e. unremovable? Or is it part of a sponsoring contract? If possible, I of course would like them removed. Otherwise, I assume we have to accept this. I have "do not track" set, but AFAIK it just sends a request not to be tracked, it does not block trackers.

Hello. Is there any way to look up for content started by a particular user? Thanks in advance.

I am clueless because personal opinion and comments seem to get a suspension or a ban . Are we meant to just ''preach'' present information ? Is there any point to a discussion if there is no neurological diversity , meaning alternative answers ? My started threads keeps getting closed down as soon as somebody doesn't like my opinions , so please tell me , what is the correct way to use a science based forum ?

hello, i prefer to ask rather than checking in the sandbox 1. if a reply was added during writing mine, do the site ask me if i still want to send because there is a new reply ? (i ask because i think you need to refresh to get new replies) 2. if the reply i'm quoting was edited during i was writing, do the site ask me if i still want to send because it got edited ?

Has the 5 post rule for new members been suspended or deleted please ?

& I will give you a piece of toast as your reward! =]

Can someone tell me how to use the status update please ??? , i cant understand it and i have been looking everywhere on how to do it 😡

How accurate is the views number under posts? Not the views to profile. I thought it was accurate because it increased slightly over time. Also the post has replies. I wanted to inspire new cryptographers. I believed it was so simple and would spread fast. Is 11,000 to large? Is it accurate?

Why does clicking on the date/time of the last post in a given topic no longer direct you to that post, but rather the first post, as does clicking on the topic header ? Have I inadvertently changed a setting, or are others experiencing this issue ?

I may have suggested this a couple of years ago, but I believe it should be reconsidered. On rare occasions, particularly when I am a busy little beaver, I sometimes forget to sign out. Put it down to being an old bastard if you like. 😉 Is it possible for one of our IT experts to add a automatic sign out procedure after say 2 hours inactivity?

How did you get the tex commands to work? Ty

A few folks have asked for this in the past. Just raising it up once again. Would be great if a Dark Mode / theme could be enabled in Admin Panel or via software plugin for SFN. Every time I’m surfing around doing stuff then come back over to SFN to see what’s up, it feels like I’m suddenly staring into the sun and need to go grab my eclipse viewing glasses. I tend to use Dark Mode / theme everywhere I can. Would be great having the same option on our profile settings here, as well. Cheers. 🥃

Why do I keep getting called a troll? Trolling is when you deliberately try to anger people, and it's probably obvious that that is not what I'm trying to do, at all.

For no other reason than to destroy the OP with witty retorts. You guys got to have all the fun! @swansont I don't know why but this had me in stitches, really! Also if believing chocolate is better than vanilla, makes you a cult, that's fine. More chocolate for the cult!

Recently purchased a mix of lab glass at fairly good price. Hoping to sell it to make some extra money and a few pieces im unsure of what they are or more specifically what kind and what to even ask for them any help would be greatly appreciated thank you. #1⬆️ #2 no clue #3 tiny evaporatory flask?⬆️#4 some kind of funnel?#5 #6 large condenser. But what type or purpose? #6 again #7 Dean Stark apparatus? #8 no clue

Is it just me or do I see a lot more locks on Religious subjects when compared to other areas in this forum? Is religion being treated differently, in other words, being protected from criticism? Over in Politics I saw a thread - Has the Republican party lost its collective mind? - that doesn't seem a nice thing to say about Republicans (FYI I am a liberal) It seems to me that in other areas of this forum, we are freely allowed to discuss issues with an open mind, after all we are all adults here But here, I feel like I am in Pakistan with all its blasphemy laws - one better watch one says about religion, and we know or at least I know since I keep mys…