missing forums...

@Alex Sorry but this doesn't make any sense.
What is the point for anyone to participate in a forum knowing that at any time, and without notice, entire sections will be wiped out?!
Why any member should invest time in commenting, creating topics or posting resources when it can all be obliterated at any time, without warning?

It's your website Alex, but the community (this forum) exists thanks to the people that contribute to it. If you handle it with such little respect for the contributors and the content created you will loose them. It's guaranteed.

I am sure you realize your forum is one among a very select few where you can find bright, deep conversations about these complex and sometimes controversial topics. Every time I come here I learn new stuff (even after 10 years) and I am amazed at the level of people posting here. It's just extraordinary and utterly rare. You have a treasure trove of clever discussions and material that is very hard to come by, and smart people that it's a joy to talk to.

You want to give the site a new direction? Fine.
But don't throw away years worth of discussions and material from the great audience you have gathered with the podcast.
For the love of god, just archive it and leave it available for everyone to read and research!

Also it wouldn't hurt if you could give people an heads up instead of unplugging the cord abruptly.

Good luck
 
Nothing much more to add and a new member here, but I find the action taken by the forum owner to be incredibly childish and immature. (Arrogant as well.)

I'll wait to see where folks may decide to gather and I'd happily follow along. I have literally zero interest in Christianity bashing and exploration of Pizzagate positioned in some incredibly twisted way as relating to consciousness research. (Seriously?)

I was, and remain, interested in consciousness research and (for me) the logical follow on topic of big questions (why are we here? who/what started this crazy universe? etc.) This had quickly become a best fit for me up until a couple months back when the weird shift started.
 
I'll wait to see where folks may decide to gather and I'd happily follow along. I have literally zero interest in Christianity bashing and exploration of Pizzagate positioned in some incredibly twisted way as relating to consciousness research. (Seriously?)

I think one connection is that all mention of anomalous consciousness (whatever you want to call it) is somehow trivialised and made into a joke by most media. For them all that can exist is the physical. Given the evidence that we discuss here, that seems strange. Likewise, given the evidence that people are presenting in the Pizzagate thread, isn't it strange that the story is just dismissed as nonsense by the main stream media?

David
 
I think one connection is that all mention of anomalous consciousness (whatever you want to call it) is somehow trivialised and made into a joke by most media. For them all that can exist is the physical. Given the evidence that we discuss here, that seems strange. Likewise, given the evidence that people are presenting in the Pizzagate thread, isn't it strange that the story is just dismissed as nonsense by the main stream media?

David

I agree with Silence. You might like to draw parallels in the way the media dismiss Psi along with Conspiracy Theories or climate change denial but the reason most of us joined this forum was to discuss psi and consciousness related subjects and to actually engage with sceptics so we could explore both sides. Alex seems to have found a new niche which has veered away from the discussions we were having in previous years. I think the mood since the latest authoritarian actions is that this ship is sinking fast and I may well be among the rats.
 
Hey all. It's Chuck.

I'd like to take a crack at hosting an open, honest, "user ruled" forum. I don't have a podcast, but we can still discuss the same issues we discuss here. I'd like to have a forum were we all have a voice in how the forum is run and what moderation looks like.

Check it out. If we can get enough users I think we can still have some interesting discussions. New install so there will be bumps in the road.

http://www.liberaparolado.com/phpBB3/
great!
 
I think that would be a good way to resolve this. Though since a lot of content has been built up during the almost 4 years this forum has existed, I suspect that we would need more than a day to find everything that we want to preserve. It would be ideal if the forums were brought back in a locked down readonly mode for a limited "transition period" of a couple of weeks, to give everybody sufficient time.
ok, one day might not be enough.
 
Alex, I'm not sure you realise what you've done. Many, many people invested many, many hours into the forums which you so casually deleted. Speaking personally, aside from the time I invested in debates etc in CD, I spent countless hours categorising CD threads for the Skeptiko Thread Index.

If you think people are going to just shrug and say, "Fine, let Dear Leader do as he sees fit", you need to do a major rethink. You are disrespecting the forum community in a major way with these autocratic acts - and this on top of the recent debates on moderation where you effectively dismissed the concerns of the community with contempt, handing out peremptory bannings like a tinpot dictator.

If you restore the deleted forums, you might maintain enough goodwill that enough of the community will stick around to keep this place viable. Otherwise, you're going to bleed goodwill until folks decide that Chuck's or somebody else's user-focussed alternative is the ship to jump to.
I prefer a smaller forum focused on the podcast episodes.
 
The CD forum was, for the most part, the only part of the forum I visited regularly and made contributions to. For anyone interested in debates and discussions around psychical research - supposedly a main focus of this whole enterprise - it was the best place to find valuable or interesting information. And I would note that you rarely participated in any conversations in that subforum. That may be due to your lack of interest, but those conversations were still relevant to the topics you discuss on your show and care about - or used to discuss, anyway.

You may not want a wide-ranging community, but if you want to maintain a community beyond yourself and an ever-shrinking echo chamber, removing the most popular section of your message board (that still fit within the nominal range of this site) seems a poor way to do it.
I prefer a smaller forum focused on the podcast episodes.
 
Don't NDEs usually say it's the little things in the end that count, like the way you treat people, and not whatever else you think is So Important? I can't connect that to the gross disregard here to the many people who have massively committed themselves to those forums, for some it's become part of their lives, and now suddenly, without warning - wham! it's gone. Just like: Get another life, dude.
seems a tad bit over-dramatic... I think you were around when we lost yrs worth of posts from the old forum... life does go on.

I'm fine with folks pulling stuff off and re-posting somewhere else. you even send me a note about a new forum that will be more psi oriented... great... much needed... and not really my thing anymore.
 
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I mean, this is a joke, for genuine lack of a better way to say it. I cannot believe how utterly unreasonable, irrational, and rash this decision was.

Just... there's so, so much valuable information in those subforums and threads. Like a couple others have said, at least leaving them "locked" but readable would allow people who are at an earlier point in their journey/learning to read in depth and glean some significant information that can influence them. I know I originally only listened to the podcasts, waaaaaaaaay back when they were actually about paranormal phenomena/NDEs/psychical research, etc. (which at this point seems like years ago), but what drew me to the forum was reading not only through the current debates in the CD subforum and Consciousness and Science subforum, but digging back months or years to lengthy and detailed discussions between both proponents and skeptics. Those threads contain just loads of intelligent (and sometimes unintelligent, but nonetheless meaningful) discussions that helped me along in my personal journey.

Now, Alex, it may not be your desire to foster a site where people learning about the paranormal, NDEs, or other like research and phenomena, can go to really learn and see arguments from both sides of the story, but if I were in your shoes, I would have certainly felt accomplished and taken great pride in having created a site such as what Skeptiko has historically been. With this decision, you've pretty much completely destroyed that and all evidence of it ever having existed. You've also completely slapped in the face the members who spent dozens and dozens, likely hundreds, of hours in discussion, researching, reading, and thinking to produce the content that you deleted. Frankly, "slapped in the face" doesn't begin to do it justice. And all this just weeks after people voiced their displeasure over the deletion of a thread that was for the most part, in my opinion, not very valuable and contained immature and reckless back and forth between one of our former members and some of his Twitter battle buddies. Here we are, about 2 weeks later, and two entire subforums are gone, including, as Flowers, Will, and Laird have said, the most valuable subforum to the majority of forum members by far.



That you somehow think this would come within millions of light years of rectifying this ridiculous decision makes it all the more pitiful. Nothing short of bringing the threads back in their entirety and locking them so that no one can further post in them (wherein I guarantee you STILL lose a huge chunk of membership) is sufficient. At least in that scenario people can still come learn, read, and research from the past contributions of the members here, skeptics and proponents alike, regardless of how poor Skeptiko becomes in the future. At least then it would still have significant value, though I would bet a fairly inactive forum that is limited to a small group of people.



To this, I'm nearly speechless. You have created this issue, and if you care remotely about having forum members to post, or as I said earlier information that is incalculably valuable to the people who read and seriously consider it, it is your job to fix it. Perhaps prior to making this decision you might have considered the ramifications a bit more deeply, including how easy or not it would be to undo the action in the event that you didn't like the result.
oh lordy :) this is silly.
 
We had a pretty neat community here. A little dysfunctional maybe, but a decent core of genuine posters. Alex very rarely visited the forum's vibrant underbelly so can't understand what he's done; it was a unique space, a lot of us are very disappointed.
I kinda get that, but that was never really my intent. I mean, I'm not interested in hosting a forum that I'm not a part of (or all that interested in). I didn't really didn't pay any attention at all to the "vibrant underbelly" until I got a couple of emails about some of the "off-topics" subject being discussed. again, I don't have to judge it in order to say that I'm not interested in hosting it.
 
I agree with Silence. You might like to draw parallels in the way the media dismiss Psi along with Conspiracy Theories or climate change denial but the reason most of us joined this forum was to discuss psi and consciousness related subjects and to actually engage with sceptics so we could explore both sides. Alex seems to have found a new niche which has veered away from the discussions we were having in previous years. I think the mood since the latest authoritarian actions is that this ship is sinking fast and I may well be among the rats.
dude... you really have no idea what yr talking about. the show is growing and the response lately has been very positive. I'm always changing and evolving, but I'm getting tired of the whining and hating.

my vision of the forum was people sharing links, genuine insights and new information... not a gripe-fest.

I'll give you a couple days to mull this over... email if you want to continue posting.
 
oh lordy :) this is silly.
I would guess that most people here are looking at what you did and saying the very same thing.

It's become obvious that you are woefully unaware of the actual value of the forum, which I guess should've been obvious from the start when you said that these debates can be held really anywhere on the internet, and that they don't need to be here. Obviously you have the right to do what you want with the forum, but your abruptness with your decision and complete dismissal of the many legitimate (or compelling, should I say, like you said in the first post) reasons that people have given that this was a terrible decision is laughable.
 
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@Alex Sorry but this doesn't make any sense.
What is the point for anyone to participate in a forum knowing that at any time, and without notice, entire sections will be wiped out?!
Why any member should invest time in commenting, creating topics or posting resources when it can all be obliterated at any time, without warning?

It's your website Alex, but the community (this forum) exists thanks to the people that contribute to it. If you handle it with such little respect for the contributors and the content created you will loose them. It's guaranteed.

I am sure you realize your forum is one among a very select few where you can find bright, deep conversations about these complex and sometimes controversial topics. Every time I come here I learn new stuff (even after 10 years) and I am amazed at the level of people posting here. It's just extraordinary and utterly rare. You have a treasure trove of clever discussions and material that is very hard to come by, and smart people that it's a joy to talk to.

You want to give the site a new direction? Fine.
But don't throw away years worth of discussions and material from the great audience you have gathered with the podcast.
For the love of god, just archive it and leave it available for everyone to read and research!

Also it wouldn't hurt if you could give people an heads up instead of unplugging the cord abruptly.

Good luck
I think we're moving in the right direction. Let's get the forums I'm not interested in moved to another place. then I'll give everyone time to move stuff (maybe I can even find some way to export... not sure about that though)
 
I think we're moving in the right direction. Let's get the forums I'm not interested in moved to another place. then I'll give everyone time to move stuff (maybe I can even find some way to export... not sure about that though)
What Bucky said is virtually the same thing I said, yet you dismissed mine as "silly".
 
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