Poll: Should we ban Rossi-related discussions?

I suggest leaving everything as it is. This Rossi matter will not go away soon. On a topic that is charged such as this one, it will be very difficult for LENR Forum moderators to excercise the necessary judgment to distinguish between removing/editing content they believe to be rambling/off-topic/unconstructive, on one hand, and making posts go away that they have a personal dislike of or that they believe to be in error, on the other. I've already seen several occasions on which this line seemed to be crossed. For everyday discussion, we need less moderator involvement, not more.

There has been little toxic here in the past few weeks. What we've seen is a robust debate, and people who are emotionally attached to untenable positions being required to argue their positions before a group of people who are willing to query their assumptions. The only thing that moderators should excercise far greater diligence with is rare case of egregious harassment of forum participants by other participants.

Quote from Keieueue

I don't know what toxic means to you, but I do assure you the quality of trolling and ill will shown by some posters would have gotten them permabanned on video games forum populated by edgy 12yr olds high on energy drinks and their first wordy insults.

Yes, there has been some trolling, for sure. Mainly emotionally charged, contentless posts. I've also seen a few posts that have raised the most baseless charges against certain forum participants, who are sincere and who have put in a lot of time following LENR. There's no need to delete such posts, which brings in the question of moderator discretion. Too often there's someone with poor communication skills who still has some interesting things to say, in between the contentless posts, or within a post that otherwise has little of value. I suggest you ignore such posts and such contributors. It is an easy thing to do.

@barty
Why would you even think that banning a subject will cause people to become more friendly and civilized and they will behave less like animals?
If you do not allow a subject A, they will just sling mud on another subject B....they will simply find a reason to insult and attack others. Topic doesn't matter.

Also, there is a need to allow the freedom of expression, as long as it is kept civil and scientific. It has to be done for all lenr (or other) techs.
So I suggest just keep deleting the bad posts and keep banning the people (may be after 3 warnings) instead of stopping all discussion.

Other than Rossi's actions, what topics lead to flame wars? I submit there are few or none. Therefore the problem will go away when more actual information on Rossi comes out. My proposal is to stop all comments on the worst threads and let people start new threads that are clearly marked as Rossi related. Personally, I would not read a thread with 'Rossi' in the title until verifiable test results emerge.

More moderation is too much to ask from the moderators. I am guessing that the mods are here because they are interested in LENR, not because they enjoy being parents to little children.

A whole lot of "Ban the other guy, but not me" in this thread.

Perhaps the elitists can think up a character to put in the title of their non-Rossi topics to make it easy for those who hate the common rabble to find. They can go on speculating about angels dancing on pinheads as if doing science.

This is simple. If you wish to know what Rossi is doing, and about the progress of the lawsuit, you should allow Rossi-related posting. If you do not wish to know about these things, you should shut them down.

If you ban people opposed to Rossi you will only hear what Rossi himself says. There is no other source of information about him. He publishes no technical details. You can learn that by reading his blog, so I don't see much point to it.

I thought this site might provide some nuts and bolts engineering/ scientific knowledge on
do it yourself LENR. So far, slim pickins, or too often a dead end clown show.

vis a vis Rossi,,
It's a free country, and people should be able to waste their time anyway they wish, but it is tiresome to read
endless arguments from people don't know any facts, don't have any legal expertise, don't have any technical
knowledge of even the most basic real world physical realities, and can't accept the fact that there is no Santa Claus.

The Rossi noise take up entirely too much space and will eventually render this blog irrelevant. One thread, "All things Rossi" is sufficient ,
necessary, and adequate to the task

I feel as though people should be free to discuss any topic that is lenr-related here, even Rossi. Yes, the situation involving Rossi has become toxic. But I say ban disrespectful people, not discussions.

Quote from Keieueue

Rothwells nitpicking unverified data

The data is verified by me. Rossi himself verified it. What more do you want?

"Nitpicking" seems like an odd description. For example, I pointed out that is impossible to have 1 MW of steam generation in a pipe with a pressure of 0.0 bar (a vacuum). That seems obvious to me, and I would say it is a major problem with Rossi's data. Some people disagreed, saying that is not a vacuum, it means the gauge pressure is 0.0 bar compared to the atmosphere. In other words, the pipe is at 1 atm. That seems equally impossible to me, but that is the claim. People who say this probably have never seen large amounts of steam. Here are some videos of happens when a boiler of this scale malfunctions. I think you can see there is more than 1 atm of pressure in them:

If this is mere nitpicking, what would you call a major discrepancy?

censorship? no?

It might help with the moderation, to limit the number of letters per post to avoid these endless repetition of always the same text. Secondly, if the WoltLab SW allows it, to limit the number of posts per member, per day.

I vote for make it go away. I hope it doesn't come to this with me356,well at least he is not stirring the pot up.

Quote from Peter Gluck

The discussions are natural and unavoidable, the LeonardoCorp.-industrial Heat exists and it will last. It will have a negative influence on the Secretary of Defense Report- will this be Rossiless as IH supporters want or including Rossi with direct discussions between him and the investigators? Reality does not go away if we ignore or ban it and the conflict is real.
Discussions at the forum are organized in threads we ahve to take care to respect the subjects so everybody can happily neglect what it dislikes e.g. the argle-bargle.

Peter

I follow Peter...

Just try to limit the number of threads. There are 3 or 4 Rossi-IH threads that are pretty much the same discussions. One thread on the latest Rossi tech and one thread on the meta Rossi-IH stuff should be enough, most of the time.

Just merge the new IH threads into a main thread, when they come up.

I would agree to limit AR to one thread. All we know about AR at this point is what he posts on his blog (I have stopped reading it because I don't believe what he is writing). Anyone here could set up a blog and post what he is posting. I know that's all some people need to believe what he is saying, but without verification of some kind it is nothing more than "Rossi Says". I don't expect that to change any time in the near future. So perhaps just one thread called Rossi and everything about him goes inside it.

This all reminds me of the early days after the P+F press conference in 1989. A usenet group called alt.physics.fusion was first filled with interesting first-hand information from groups trying to replicate the experiment. It gradually became dominated by non-scientific arguments and name calling. Those trying to replicate were called "True Believers" and the other side were the Skeptics. That is about the time that I, and many others, checked out.

I like the idea of better curating the names of the threads. As suggested above, I like the idea of Rossi-tech and Rossi-IH, for instance where I would read the first one and free to ignore the second one. The up/down voting could help to keep the discussions in the appropriate thread. I would also read me365-tech, Miszuno-tech, etc. That way, no one is censored, but those of us that just want to read about the science and technology can find it without wading through all of the other stuff.

Quote from Robert Horst

This all reminds me of the early days after the P+F press conference in 1989. A usenet group called alt.physics.fusion was first filled with interesting first-hand information from groups trying to replicate the experiment. It gradually became dominated by non-scientific arguments and name calling. Those trying to replicate were called "True Believers" and the other side were the Skeptics. That is about the time that I, and many others, checked out.

I hope this is not de ja vu.

Best regards
Frank

I am so annoyed of all the Rossi vs. IH threads that and I am avoiding them. Because these threads are spamming the "Last 5 posts" overview I am frequently using I have to go through all the sub forums to find relevant news. Therefor I would like to have a single Rossi spam thread. Btw: I belief that Rossi has what he claims and wish him and his technology a soon commercial breakthrough.

Greatings to the moderate

I think Mr. Rossi and his information is vital to this forum. If he is proven to have lied, he shall be a joke in due course. If he has been found to be truthful, I would like to hear it here first.