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We have clear rules about what belongs where. Here's a link to what goes into speculations. Censorship would be to delete it. We don't delete it. We don't suppress it. We just categorize it. Note that if you follow the rules of the Speculations forum, your average tinfoil hat junk does not belong there. It might at first end up there by accident (or because we're a friendly bunch of mods), but we have a trashcan for the really bad stuff. Thank you for your suggestion.

! Moderator Note Let's hope that now being able to ignore one's nemesis is a satisfactory solution. And to anyone else reading this, please don't EVER go through and delete whole posts from any thread you've been in. Take the time to post things you're proud of. Since there is no further reason for this to be open, I'll close it now.

That's not quite right. I wasn' concerned about his actions. That was taken care of in the other forum. I asked the following question and after presenting the example I inquired And that is the essenf this thread. And I've been nothing except very polite' date=' reasonalble and logical in all my reponses and inquiries. The example is completely anonymous. Both the name of the person and the name of the forum is kept a secret so as to esure that this doesn't get at all personal. In fact when someone, who also frequents that forum, mentioned his name I promptly asked then to delete the name from their post, and then were kind enough to do so. This is [i']purely[/i] an intellectual exercise. That's correct. But to be precise, he said or in short You're out to get me. To me, when someone says You're out to get me its an attack on my character. His response had nothing to due with my original argument, i.e. him that a particle with rest mass can't move at the speed of light. In the course of this discussion I gained a precise knowledge of what an ad hominem is and as such I now know that it was a personal attack aka ad hominem. I quickly deleted that comment so I will not discuss it. I later said that I his comment expresses frustration since the purpose of the comment Oh, for crying out loud. is to express frustration. I even looked it up just to make sure. And I gave that link - http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_crying_out_loud Its not a subjecctive comment but an objective one. Nope. Its not an attack when there's no question that its frustration. swansont will probanbly agree that he was frustrated, hence his remark. That can't be used as a premise to claim that my observation of that was an attack on his person. In essence all I said was Why are you impatient which I changed to Why are you frustrated?. Those aren't attacks on a person by any means. Please don't take this conversation into a negative mode. There's just no call for that kind of thing here. The purpose of this thread was to distinguish whether something was an ad hominem or not. I just happened to use a real life example. The persons name and the forum's name was intentionally left out of this thread so as to keep it a secret. This has nothing to do with that person or that forum but merely the definition and example of ad hominem. Before this thread I wasn't 100% clear on what an ad honinem was. Now I cleary know all about them. The rest of my responses were answers to questions posed of me and commenting on others responses. This is an exercise in an intellectual analysis of a particular part of cogent arguments. In particular its an analysis of the fallacy known as the personal attack aka ad hominem. I've been quite polite and logical throughout this thread, avoing negative deviations from the main topic. I've been reading the book Practical Logic: An Antidote for Uncritical Thinking. Its part of my study of critical thinking and constructing cogent arguements and recogning logical fallacies. The personal attack which I used as an example was just that, an example. I created another thread as a continuation of this study. The name of that thread is Critical Thinking Skills.

Please don't put words into my mouth. The thought of "picking on me" never entered my mind. Btw, I made a mistake. Oh, for crying out loud is not an attack, its meant to show the emotion of either frustration, exasperation, or annoyance. See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_crying_out_loud. In any case I deleted that comment because I thought that it was unwarrented. Sometimes we all say things we regret later. I've decided to delete those things when I can so as to be as polite as I can. I imagine that's fine with you? That's correct. They are. And yo used it wronig. The only way I Can see to resolve any misunderstanding with the definition is to realize that a personal attack is not simply not an attack on a person. They are not the same thing. That's clear from the definition. Note: I've already said I'm done with ad hominems so I won't adress them again with you. I believe that you and have already paved that road.

Aethelwulf - Up until this point no names have been used. I didn't want this to be an attack on a person who isn't here to defend themsleves. That would be bringing a fight from that forum to this forum and that's the furthest thing fro my mind. CAn you do me a favor? Please edit your post and delete that name. Thank you.

I often run across posts where someone has written "Cancel" or "Oooops" or "Nevermind". I soft-delete them, which removes them from the sight of everyone but the staff. We never fully delete anything. I'll reinforce what swansont said about abuse as well. When we had greater editing capabilities available, we had members who got angry at something someone said and went back and deleted all their posts. It left many threads completely incomprehensible, except where they were actually quoted.

The flip side to this is that there are people who will post something outrageous or full of nonsense, and then go back and change or delete the post and try to play the innocent, which is a nightmare from a moderation standpoint. It used to be that the ability to edit expired after a few hours, so that changing the post could not happen. For my own part, even though as a moderator I can do this, if it's more than a typo and not noticed during a proof-read right after I post, I use the strike-out function. There's also the view that having the reality that you can't put the genie back in the bottle might make people weigh their words a little more carefully.

I know you should "look before you leap" or think first, act later. However if I do something rashly then I'm sure others do too. Sometimes I post a reply and then wish I hadn't. Perhaps I quickly realise that I have misunderstood some-one else's post or that my reply is inappropriate in some way. If the "edit" facility is still available I can change the wording of my post - but I can't delete the whole post. Since I have to post something I end up, perhaps, posting an apology. Would it be a good idea to allow use of the "edit" facility to cancel completely a whole post? Example from one of my posts - "Changed my mind - might come back"

If you're having a problem sending private messages, why not ask us for help resolving it? Nobody has disabled your private messaging system, so the only possible problem is that you have more than 500 PMs, which exceeds the quota; if so, delete some old ones to free up space. Otherwise, ask us and we can help resolve the problem. If you object to a specific moderator action, use the Report link attached to their post. I can't make a meaningful comment about your accusations without knowing what actions you're talking about. Incidentally, I would greatly appreciate it if you'd stop insulting our staff by private message. It's getting tiresome.

There are no qualifications required. The existing team decides whether or not a nominated individual should have the permission to move, delete, and edit posts/threads added to their account. That's really it.

I could delete it entirely and let you create a new one. Would that work?

We don't generally delete posts unless they're off-topic or particularly egregious rule violations; we prefer to leave a note in-thread.

There is no option to delete your profile. You can change the your username yourself in the settings, if I remember correctly. Other entries about you in your profile you can also delete yourself. If you cannot change your username send a PM to Cap'n Refsmmat, he can change it in "the guy who is afraid of his Google past" or whatever you prefer.

Hey there. I used to be a total lover of this place and such, but things have happened and such, and ive kind of drifted elsewhere in interest. But im trying to kind of wipe off my history on different sites, how do you delete your profile here? I cant quite find a delete button or anything. XD Sorry, im not abondoning you guys or anything, I just dont have time or anything anymore, and I dont want my name to be under science forums from back when I was younger to be my first thing that pops up on google. Not that thats a bad thing or anything, I just want to be known differently and such, no offense to anyone, please. =]

Hm. That's a bug in my code, not your fault; it looks like the system that puts recent blog posts on the front page didn't notice that your posts were deleted. I've removed them manually. Feel free to re-post. In the future, you shouldn't need to delete posts if there's something wrong with them; you can edit them or set their status back to "draft" to make them invisible again while you edit.

I messed upo my blog. A Rose is A Rose appears twice in recent blog list, but clicks on both do not work. I tried to delete them but it didn't work. How do I get them off the site, and reload a correct version? Please help.

Possibly, but the consequences shouldn't be much more than the 30 post rule and even if it happens the moderators of those forums would just lock or delete the threads. No matter what policy change is made, there will be some negative repercussions, but at this point the problem has simply gotten too bad for inaction. The optimal solution may not be ideal, but that does not justify holding to a non-optimal solution.

What's just worked for me is to highlight the text you want, right click and choose Copy then highlight it all (except quote tags), and delete it all including the bit you copied then paste in between the quote tags to put in the bit you saved.

I am having trouble making these functions work in the posting/reply editor here. Can we do these things here ( if so what I am doing wrong or what procedure should I be following ) ? I seem able to select/all but then I can't copy, cut (although paste seems OK) ? I have to use backspace or delete to get rid of unwanted content. any help much appreciated

No, you can't delete your account, as that would mess up thread continuity. You can, however, simply never log on again.

I would like to not have this account anymore...anyone know how to delete? Or are we prisoner on this?

The personal settings page merely lists all of your attachments on posts -- they are not separate. It doesn't make sense for you to delete a file from your settings but still have it attached to your posts. I'd like to increase the upload limit, but we currently are running out of disk space. I think we'll be upgrading to larger disks soon.

I was unfortunate enough to be managing my personal settings one day , , when I thought it might be efficient to delete the attachments in the 10 MB memory area . This was mainly because 10 MB could be filled quite easily , so it would be good to keep it clear . Later , I realised that all attachments on posts had been deleted . Would it be a good idea to be able to delete from personal settings whilst keeping post attachments ? 10 MB also seems like an amount of memory based on a time long gone ! Is it time to use 100 MB ? We must progress ! We need technological advancement !

So far, I've restricted members to having signatures only after 10 posts. Particularly devious spammers would make a completely innocuous post, wait a couple weeks, and then add links to their signature, so that nobody would notice the links and they could sit for months. I've also restricted the number of PMs sent by new members, since some spammers just PMed spam to everyone. It's also possible to do a flood limit and limit them to a certain number of posts per day; that would slow down the ones that want to make as many spam posts as possible, but it's not particularly helpful as we can delete all of the posts with one "Flag As Spammer" button. I could, hypothetically, ban new members from using links altogether, although that would be trickier, and would be very inconvenient for the non-spammer members. Looks like this only applies to members with less than thirty posts. I'm not sure that's intentional.

Suppose an atheist goes to a church and, in the middle of the sermon, starts shouting loudly that the God the parishioners worship is a fraud. Or suppose a fundamentalist goes to a meeting of some atheist organization and starts shouting loudly that the members will burn in Hell. Neither has any right to freedom of speech in those venues. The only expectation either one should have is that they will be tossed, maybe vigorously, that they may be arrested for disturbing the peace, and that they may be sued for harassment. Your right to freedom of speech ends at the moment you leave the public sidewalk. Once you enter private property you have no such rights. Even on the public sidewalk your rights are not absolute. If you make a lot of noise at 1AM in a neighborhood you can be arrested for disturbing the peace. If you and a whole bunch of people get together to hold some protest at 1PM but do not obtain the necessary permit the whole lot of you can be arrested for disturbing the peace. What the government cannot do is refuse to grant you the necessary permit because they don't like what they think you will be saying. The owners, administrators, and moderators of an internet forum focused on science face a dilemma: Do they take an open or closed stance regarding fringe/nonstandard/completely whacked science? Both sides of the dilemma have advantages and disadvantages. The closed stand risks missing the boat on what truly is a major scientific breakthrough but has a much greater chance of having real discussions of science. The open stance risks having all energy going into arguing over nonsense, with no real discussion of science, but allows the possibility of a major breakthrough being discussed at their site. Freedom of speech, or lack thereof, is not an issue. Almost all sites quickly and quietly delete posts that tell people where to buy knockoff designer handbags or pills that can enhance your virility. Regarding the deletion of posts: I would prefer it if there was a whole lot more deletion of nonsense posts and banning of crackpots at this site. Almost all energy at this site goes into arguing over nonsense, leaving very little room for real discussion of science. However, since I am not the owner of this site, my desires for stronger moderation are not satisfied here. To see my desires realized, I would need to either start my own forum or go to another that better suits me. I do the latter. My posting rate is considerably lower at this site than it is elsewhere.