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[Chris Wilkins]

In these situations there is always a motive, a reason for why it happened. It doesn't make sense they did it "just because" or because Josh is a satan worshipper.

So let's use the process of elimination.

Now it could be just because they found it too much of a headache. Monitoring a forum of 85,000 people would require a lot of effort. But then again it appears that many volunteers did that and therefore did not actually occupy that much of Josh's time, contrary to what he professes. So that can't be the reason.

Was it money? Was the forum costing them lots and lots of money? Can't believe that. It would have been a small part of the website. Plus I imagine it would have actually brought money in. Didn't a number of members actually bring in money for the different charity drives? So it can't be that either.

Did RD just turn into a megolamaniac over night? That doesn't make sense. From the way he talks I would think his decisions are thought out in advance and he doesn't do things off the fly.

Was it just a bad mistake? If it was, an admission of "sorry fellas. I stuffed up. Let's talk and sort it out" would have fixed it. This didn't happen. So not that either.

What about Josh's belief that it was technical reasons, that the forum was creaking at the sides? But was it? I believe things were getting slow, but there would have been much better ways to go about this. And if the forum was valued by the people running it they would have sought out that better way.

Then there is the fact they said you would be able to download your stuff. But then have done everything to stop people from doing this. Now this is important to me. If they, as they state, think the forum is not worth much, why go to such an effort to stop people from downloading it?

And what about the strange conditions that whatever you gave to the forum they owned the copyright? Even if not enforceable, this is also significant as it shows their attitude. They say it isn't worth much, but they want to keep it and not let anyone else get a copy of it.

What has been growing on me for the last day is the fact that on the 27th of Jan, less than a month ago, someone said they wanted to use the information for a book.

Now, if I was RD I would have said, fantastic. Let's form the "RDF Publishing Company". You guys make it, I fund it, we stick "RDF Publishing" on it, and away we go. But he didn't.

This to me is a hugely strong reason for doing what they did; they realised the forum was a valuable store of information that books could be created from that might detract from the "greatly liked and respected person", that he might have to share the spot light with another book that didn't have his name on it. Now if you believe you are arrogant and believe you are a great man, you wouldn't want to do this. In fact, you would see such a situation as a threat.

At any time RD could have fixed this. But he hasn't even had one contact with anyone from the forum. Therefore, I believe he is happy to let it die. Which only leaves the above.

What do you think? Did Richard want to kill the forum because with books coming from it, it would have gone from helping him to competing with him?

[Ayaan]

Josh was rarely on the forum (his user name is admin), so it couldn't have been that monitoring it was a problem. That was left to the forum staff. Judging from what he said to the staff he had little idea of what happened on the forum.

Granted there were technical problem with the forum. I don't know what was done to solve - the staff could never get any info about that. It could be that he solution to the problem was deemed too costly and that Josh and chalkers came up with the idea of a totally new design and format. We may never know the reason. But there is no doubt that it is a textbook case of how not to handle this sort of thing.

[hackenslash]

Hi, Chris.

Two things I want to share with you, so I'm glad you're here. The first is that I sent a message to Richard again this evening, which he has read. It read as follows:

I do wish that you would see your way to communicating with us. We can't hope to resolve anything without dialogue, and since communications have been effectively hobbled, all we have is that which is filtered through third parties with a sensationalist agenda. Our aims are still the same, and the foundation's core principles are still principles that we all share.

Regards,

Tony Murphy

As you can see, I have only asked for communication, in a reasonable tone. Hardly the howling lunatics we are painted to be, and you can see for yourself that we are rational and reasonable people. I know that many have no intention of engaging in conciliation, but I also know that many do, or are undecided. All I am askig for is dialogue here. Without that dialogue, we are effectively being cut off. Do you see anything unreasonable in this, or indeed the earlier message I sent?

I have as yet received no response to either communication. I appreciate that he's on tour, and very busy, but he is not too busy to actually read the messages, and a curt response would not significantly affect his schedule. Even if it's just to tell me to piss off. I am also fairly sure that he's received a lot of messages, and I can appreciate that he hasn't time to answer all of them, but a simple 'we'll talk when I return from the antipodes' would suffice to placate and to cool the situation somewhat.

Secondly, through a little mucking around under the guidance of somebody more net-savvy than I, I have managed to save some of the deleted material. I have so far only saved 27 pages of posts by DarwinsBulldog, a) because there was one post (that I believe I mentioned previously) that I wanted for my boilerplate collection, because it was an excellent expose of the supernatural and the science against it, and b) because I wanted to show you the calibre of his work.

Here is a cached page of an article he penned in November last year. As you can see for yourself, it's a brilliant bit of hard science writing, covering four posts, dealing with blind cave fish and the evolution of the eye. This work is supposed to be what the foundation is about. Again, I managed to save about 27 posts out of his posting history of just over 11,000 posts. I only collected the hard science posts, ignoring such things as comic interjections and moderator notes. This post alone represents a good deal of work. Have a look for yourself.

Cheers,

Tony

Edit: When I say that so far I have saved 27 posts, that is all that can be recovered of this user's posts, unless anybody else has any bright ideas.

[virphen]

From all I have seen, I suspect that the real reason is that Josh/Andrew have a format in mind, and merging the existing forum with that forum or integrating it in some other way was just too hard for them, and given Josh seems to regard forums as worthless, not worth any hassle in maintaining a separate one.

[hackenslash]

Oh, and in case you haven't seen it yet, here is a retrieved copy of the deleted thread that started this débâcle.


Oh, and you will see a reference in there to a thread entitled 'cunts and n**gers'. Before that gets jumped on, it was actually a thread about the comparative abusiveness of particulr words, and was actually a quite enlightened discussion. You can find the thread here. The thread title was changed to 'The C word and the N word', to protect the sensibilities of those that may have gotten the wrong impression.

[Calilasseia]

Ah, Hack has beaten me to it.

So, we have a preserved version of the thread that contained the actual protests, courtesy of this link, and all you need to do in order to determine that NONE of the insults Timonen quote-mined were ever posted in that thread, is to perform a simple text search for those insults on that page. Which means that we now have hard evidence that Timonen was lying to his boss. Indeed, the antics he has been engaged in have been so egregiously duplicitous, that if I had engaged in similar antics in several past workplaces, I would not merely have been handed my cards, I would have been looking at a prison sentence. I contend that there is a bona fide case for Timonen to face criminal prosecution for his actions.

[virphen]

Ah, Hack has beaten me to it.

So, we have a preserved version of the thread that contained the actual protests, courtesy of this link, and all you need to do in order to determine that NONE of the insults Timonen quote-mined were ever posted in that thread, is to perform a simple text search for those insults on that page. Which means that we now have hard evidence that Timonen was lying to his boss. Indeed, the antics he has been engaged in have been so egregiously duplicitous, that if I had engaged in similar antics in several past workplaces, I would not merely have been handed my cards, I would have been looking at a prison sentence. I contend that there is a bona fide case for Timonen to face criminal prosecution for his actions.

What law would he have broken?

Regardless, it is impossible to prove that those insults were made in that thread, unless you could somehow verify that it was complete. It is of course possible to prove that they have been made elsewhere. Orbiting teapot stuff.

[Alan B]

What law would he have broken?

Illegal assumption of third party Intellectual Property Rights?
Theft of Intellectual Property?
Denial of access to Intellectual Property by the originator?
Changing the FUA to enable theft?

Edit.

[CJ]

Another thing I have just discovered is that the deletion of my account not only removed my forum posts, it also removed my front page posts as well, see here http://richarddawkins.net/print.php?id= ... mments=yes and search for CJ. You will find responses but no original posts. So the petty destruction has spread beyond the forum.

EDIT: found the original here. The front page does appear to have been compromised as there is no post from me but responses to it, It looks like the comment number is generated each time the page is accessed, hence no gap in the comment numbers http://richarddawkins.net/articles/1058

[CJ]

Another example http://richarddawkins.net/userComments,page1,5538

[CJ]

Scrub the above I have found come of my own posts on the front page http://richarddawkins.net/bdayTextD,page6 unless this is some sort of backup?

EDIT this does appear to be fro some sort of backup.

[AshtonBlack]

Holy Crap CJ. That's fucking shite! Josh/RD show no empathy at ALL.

[Thinking Aloud]

You can find the thread here.

Just to be clear, this retrieval from cache only contains pages 7-20 of what was a 28 page thread (to my knowledge) - some people have been confused by the display of "Page 7 of 9" near the top of the page - this is an artefact of the cache from my browser, and subsequent pages can be found by scrolling down.

As others have said, the insults quoted by Dawkins can be found on this site, some of which weren't even person-specific.

[95Theses]

You can find the thread here.

Just to be clear, this retrieval from cache only contains pages 7-20 of what was a 28 page thread (to my knowledge) - some people have been confused by the display of "Page 7 of 9" near the top of the page - this is an artefact of the cache from my browser, and subsequent pages can be found by scrolling down.

As others have said, the insults quoted by Dawkins can be found on this site, some of which weren't even person-specific.

Even if it is only pages 7-20 of a 28 page thread, surely no one can think we spent 7 pages rabidly threatening Josh, then 14 pages being perfectly reasonable, then switched back to rabid insults on page 21?

[klr]

Another thing I have just discovered is that the deletion of my account not only removed my forum posts, it also removed my front page posts as well, see here http://richarddawkins.net/print.php?id= ... mments=yes and search for CJ. You will find responses but no original posts. So the petty destruction has spread beyond the forum.

EDIT: found the original here. The front page does appear to have been compromised as there is no post from me but responses to it, It looks like the comment number is generated each time the page is accessed, hence no gap in the comment numbers http://richarddawkins.net/articles/1058

Wow.

Or should I say. :pissed: :pissed: :pissed: :pissed: :pissed: :pissed:

The comment numbers would indeed be dynamic - assuming the design has any sense to it at all.

The thing is though, deleting a user from the forum should not delete their posts. The forum does not "know" of the link to the front page, only the reverse.

It could be that your comments are still there, but effectively not accessible because your user account record is missing. This would then result in either your comments not displaying at all (as in the articles you've linked to), or producing an error, depending exactly on what the underlying query was trying to do.

Best guess is that whoever nuked the forum account (and the money is on a certain Andrew C.) had no idea of the full consequences of their actions. Same story as before, only worse.

You can find the thread here.

Just to be clear, this retrieval from cache only contains pages 7-20 of what was a 28 page thread (to my knowledge) - some people have been confused by the display of "Page 7 of 9" near the top of the page - this is an artefact of the cache from my browser, and subsequent pages can be found by scrolling down.

As others have said, the insults quoted by Dawkins can be found on this site, some of which weren't even person-specific.

Even if it is only pages 7-20 of a 28 page thread, surely no one can think we spent 7 pages rabidly threatening Josh, then 14 pages being perfectly reasonable, then switched back to rabid insults on page 21?

Got it in one.