The Greatest Schism on RD.net: The Evidence for Shenanigans

[lordpasternack]

Hey folks, I thought it might be helpful to create a centralised repository for the chronology of events, and the various pieces of evidence garnered by various folks over the past few days that show the mendacity of either Josh Timonen, Andrew Chalkers, or the both of them in collusion. That way, people will have a far easier time laying on such evidence, and there won't be the need to scour several separate sources to fish it all out, and we won't have to repeat ourselves so much when people repeat various bits of misinformation either here or elsewhere.

Please try to keep this thread derail and banter free. Perhaps it could be like the accent thread, where there is a normal discussion thread, and a sticky with all the meat in it?

I'll start off of course with the saved cache Thinking Aloud happened to have of most of the thread on RD.net that was supposedly so 'vitriolic' that the forum had to be closed and put into read-only mode (keep scrolling down, it's a long file): http://thinking-aloud.co.uk/temp/rdf.html

(And could we possibly mirror that cache here on our own server, given that it seems to be in TA's 'temp' server space?)

Oh, and thanks for happening to have that cache to hand TA. It is, as you can imagine, invaluable now.

[lordpasternack]

I'm currently PMing various folk and trawling a thread that Made of Stars sent me a link for on RationalSkeptic for tidbits. Made of Stars has a transcript of incriminating looking admin logs that he's hinted are by both Timonen and Chalkers. I'm hoping that later, when he's not busy, he may post all he has and say more at length about these, seeing as he was the one who got them, and was 'in the loop' at that time.

In the meantime, I'm going to post Made of Stars' record of events as posted on Pharyngula:

To those who say 'Dawkins is within his rights to shut down the forum': You're right. But you're missing the point.

The "Outrage", as Dawkins terms it, is not at the site being taken down, although there is some outrage at that.

The "Outrage" is at the way things have been done. These 'things' include:

+ Lying to the staff: We were promised consultation on the new format. We had started planning transition needs, worked on lists of tags so that old posts could be indexed to the new site, and tried to manage member concerns and expectations about the change. Ultimately, there was no consultation, just an announcement that the site would change, and we were no longer required (which is itself naive in the extreme)

+ Misrepresenting staff: There was no basis to assume that we would abuse our admin privileges through a transition, and absolutely no basis to flag this as a concern in the 'Announcement' made by 'admin'.

+ Banning individual staff and deleting their posts after they shared the 'instructions' not to resist change.

+ Demoting all the other forum mods ('blue mods') after the above event.

+ Locking the forum when dissent erupted.

+ Shutting down the PM system so people couldn't contact friends and arrange to meet elsewhere.

+ Disabling signatures and avatars that sprang up in an attempt to arrange off-site rendezvous.

+ Deleting (not suspending) dissenting members, including members who reasonably tried to contact Richard for an explanation.

+ Deleting admin logs recording the above actions. These could only have been reviewed by those involved, so why delete this evidence?

+ Continuing to disable the privileges of members who ask questions on the RD.net 'front page'. And deleting the admin logs of these actions.

+ Quote-mining the outraged posts of members who've regrouped elsewhere, and trying to pass them off as representative of all of our views.

+ Failing to provide any acknowledgement AT ALL of the thousands of man-hours provided free of charge by the staff. Not to mention the professional services offered by the staff with expertise in change management, communications, and software development. Expertise that could have helped avoid this cluster-fuck.

Personally, I'll now have 3-4 hours a day to spend doing other things than deal with reports, merge threads, deal with member emails, and moderate hot discussions between theists and atheists, creationists and evolutionary biologists, and conspiracy theorists and working scientists and engineers.

So I can't complain about that.

But what a shame to see it end in a way that was predicted and repeatedly flagged by a concerned staff.

Made of Stars
ex RD.net Forum Admin

[epepke]

Peter Harrison's summary: http://realityismyreligion.wordpress.co ... open-soon/