Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax: Trying to build defense for Rossi

Quote from Alan Smith

Your suspicions of bias are unfounded. I notice no criticism when I moderate posts attacking you, which has happened a few times. Incidentally you know nothing about how I think, but say this as part of your efforts to impress the unwary with the claim that you know what everybody is thinking. As for Dewey's jibe, it's gone, deleted, extinct, kaput. Incidentally, the best way to avoid lengthy and time consuming discussions would be for you to stop prolonging them.

1. Yes, you have moderated posts, more often green-inked them, not truly concealing what was said. I don't recall any other moderation like that, but there are no public moderation logs here and much might come down that passes without being noticed. I just happened to notice the Dewey deletion when reading over the thread, most of the time I'd miss it. I have also written that administration is an often-thankless job. That's all understood. Alan, your response here is not helping, at all. You can say that you are done discussing this and I'll take it elsewhere, but I intend to always provide an opportunity to work things out first, often, historically, taking too long, i.e, overtrusting in the possibility of coming to an agreement. I have not communicated with Dewey on this, by the way. Not yet, anyway.

2. I infer some of how you think from what you write, but ... here you read my mind as to "efforts to impress" and you claim about me what is not only not true, but you invented, by, again, mind-reading. ("the claim you know what everybody is thinking." I certainly do not know that and have never claimed it, so, that little statement could be called a lie, and it could be a lie that intends to defame and ridicule. What would you call that?

3. It is all too common that your explanations do not provide complete information. If you have edited a post, is the nature of that edit accessible to administrators? If so, the content is not "gone, deleted, extinct, kaput." If it is gone, lenr-forum has serious software problems (or has over-empowered you with a tool not necessary for ordinary moderation). Or is this just that you are insisting that it is your way or the highway? If so, that's a different problem with a different solution.

4. I'm not trying to avoid discussion, I was considering what might be a legitimate concern of yours, and pointing out how to avoid it. As usual, you take such consideration as arrogant and stupid, or something like that. To me, developing a solid community structure, as a possibility, is well worth the effort.

5. There are really simple solutions, not difficult, that would address the concerns raised here. And it appears that you have no interest in them, because .... is it because Alan Smith is always right?

(Consider this situation: Alan Smith could easily have defused this, it would have been trivial. Instead .... he is poking and provoking and arguing without helpful purpose that I can see. It remains extremely simple to convert a complaint or hopefully corrective note into a thank-you.)

Quote from Rigel

Adb, [...]

Abd. You would be familiar with the name as "Abdul" but that means "Servant of the." Nobody is called "Abdul," (who actually has the name) it would always be Abdul Something.

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[...] I think that Alan has a hard job to do.

It can be hard without skill. With skill, it can merely be tedious. I've done the job many times, starting with being a moderator on the W.E.L.L in the 1980s.

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Plus he is a Brit and has that British humor.

Not a problem, except they should learn to spell correctly.

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In the past he asked for moderators (which are different in scope than an admin).

The tool sets vary with the software. Alan suggested I might volunteer.
So I did. That day. What happened? Well, I found out that all is not necessarily well behind the scenes. What's happening? I don't know, but ... all is not well, that's clear to me. I may look at what is visible, but I don't reveal what is revealed privately to me by email. I've offered to help, recently, and that offer is still open. My goal would be -- as always -- to empower the community, without creating a populist disaster. It can be done. (Populist disasters usually fail, another topic, perhaps we can hope for better than perhaps Jed thinks. Or not. My crystal ball is on the fritz.)

You could offer your services and your style. This is not a joke. I am speculating (from mentions) that he and the other modmins got complaints what some of this discussion is getting off track from the mission of LENR.

What is the mission? How are questions like this answered? If anyone does their job, there will be complaints. Who decides what is a "valid complaint" and what is not? Administrators often are not well-informed, or if they are, are often biased. (Anyone knowledgeable has a bias!) There are well-known ways to deal with all this, but fora like this do not normally attract people with the skills and training.

This, Rigel, is the problem of governance, and it is far from simple, even though most people think they know what is to be done about it. (The common opinion is, just get rid of the evil people who have been running the place, and all will be well. And when that actually happens, after the time it takes for the society to recover from the sometimes-massive disruption, there is simply a new set of "evil people." The structure was not addressed, and people for a very long time have been assuming they know what structures work, and that the problem is only bad people. There are some who know better. A growing number of people know better.)

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The forum software "is what it is" on the plus side it's more readable than Vortex.

Vortex-l is a mailing list with an autocratic owner who, fortunately, is mostly hands-off, but he will not share control. He's going to die and the list will fail. It's only a matter of time. Mailing lists, as such, create little in the way of usable content; but they could, under some conditions that are very, very rare, because nobody can be arsed.

Wikis can be much better, but there is still the problem of governance. Wikiversity has had far better traditions than Wikipedia, of academic freedom,l and Wikiversity is neutral by inclusion, whereas Wikipedia attempts to exclude points of view (which is perhaps more appropriate for an encyclopedia, a concise compendiium, whereas Wikiversity is much more like a university library, plus all the student work, seminars, presentations, etc. The major founder of Wikiversity ended up blocked, though, because he stood for academic freedom against administrators whose operating principle was "I'm in charge." He called this "Wiki disease," and without protective structure, all wikis are vulnerable to it. And that is a long story, but, bottom line, the Wikiversity resource on cold fusion is an extremely useful location for the compilation of coherent material on LENR, it is only that at any point, the Wikipedians -- who always vastly outnumber the Wikiversitans, if the former become exercised -- could pile in and and overturn the applecart. It's just that they don't usually do that. (There have been attempts, and they lost, but only because they've never been organized and most Wikipedians don't even know about Wikiversity. When Stewards -- who are generally Wikipedians -- have become interested, they exercise much more control, and they can and have globally (and unilaterally) banned users who disagreed with them. Most stewards are way above that, but ... the exceptions can be doozies. And then the stewards circle the wagons.

I did set up potential governing structure on Wikiversity. I was supported, but only a little. I was probably the most popular user there, for quite a while, that's what the structure that was set up showed, but nobody cared to do the work it would take to create something that could survive the onslaught of wiki disease. I did not attempt to push it, because I saw that there was not sufficient foundation. Just a start. If you are going to shoot the King, don't miss!

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If it were more like a blog, I would love to see an Adb's corner, Axils axioms, Jeds NDA facts and grumblings. But its not setup that way. So we have to be brief and salient. I am glad you like Quora and I understand wikipedias edit wars. But this forums design is limited and by design works best on smaller posts. For me I don't see a heavy hand. The fact that he offers explanations is kinda amazing. It should be violate the TOS and get a 2 day vaca.

Those things could be set up here. It would simply take the will of the community, with mods willing to support it. However, it may be much easier to simply have cooperating fora!

Have you actually read the TOS? Was it followed?

The TOS was an old intention, not a realized structure. It is hardly ever enforced, and the procedure it sets up is not used.

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One small suggestion for your new website. Have it use other authentication than email. Get it to accept facebook/google+ etc. Why?? it could be perceived to harvest emails and possibly ip ranges. Of course I am not saying you would. But someone could and has.

For you, I suggest considering the overall community structure, not just the structure of a single site. We, as a community, have many resources we can use, and they do not need to be unifed. There is power in diversity. Have you read the first post on coldfusioncommunity.net? Here: http://coldfusioncommunity.net/hello-world/

I will consider using Facebook authentication. But I'm looking at the problem from the other end. I got about a dozen signups in one day. Almost all of them used a throwaway fake email site, that provides a very temporary email address for authentication. I sat on those, thinking about it for a day. Then I deleted all of them. These were not people, members of a community, joining to share with others, these were probably spammers. If eleven out of twelve signups in one day (when normal signup was maybe one, if that) used the same service -- which I didn't even know about until I saw these and researched it -- they were almost certainly connected. And if I'm wrong, and if they are really part of or want to be part of the cold fusion community, they can find a way. But that is, effectively, my site. If they don't trust me not to sell their frikking email address -- which would be the real problem -- then they can go play in some other sandlot, not the one where I live. At this point, anonymous comments are allowed. Only one spam comment has been placed, so far. Yes. Fingers crossed, and I do expect the spammers to start doing their business, and there are then tools I will install.

Nevertheless, decisions like this will ultimately not be made by me. ASAP, I will step back. Volunteers to help?

Edit: added bracketed ellipsis in first and second quoted sections.

What drove the administrative cabal on Wikipedia crazy (do you know that Jimbo Wales, when he created it, call it that?) was that I did not just accuse administrators of violating policy, I documented it. Fully. And followed due process.

Quote from Forty-Two

Alan Smith wrote:

Then Alan is a very unusual human being. Bias is normal. And trained police, for example, are trained as to how to avoid damage from it. Most police abuse problems are due to lack of training, not "racism" or other forms of bias, as such.

What if the person asks a question where that is an obvious -- and clear -- answer, in context and with colloquial meanings of the word? I wrote, about this ban affair, that I'd happily accept such a temporary ban if it was serving the cause of establishing civility on lenr-forum. com. You might notice that I'm not having any ongoing problem with the admin who banned me. I have suggested that policy should be followed, and if policy isn't adequate, it should be improved. The admin thought he was following policy and that simply reading policy should have put me on notice that I could be banned. He was simply incorrect. If policy were being followed, as reasonably implemented, I would not have been banned, I'd have been warned.

In context, my use of "idiot" was an obvious joke, not a true insult. In the examples below, and from substantial evidence, the intention was to grossly offend and denigrate. So what were these examples, because Alan makes a comment about it that raises the question of when this happened.

"He is a douchebag, and so are you" Aug 8th 2016 About Tom Darden and me.
"You have to be either really stupid or really malicious" Aug 8th 2016 About me.
"Miserable sob" Aug 2nd 2016 About me.
"You're such a whimp" Jul 29th 2016 About me.
"Fruitcake" Jul 25th 2016 About me.
"You are a misarable piece of meat, (which is a fact)" Jul 25th 2016 About me.
"You're so full of BS" Jul 4th 2016 About Jed Rothwell.
"Wow! What a fuddy piece of hypocrite you are" Jun 28th 2016 About Jed Rothwell.
"You are a XXXXXXX lier" Jun 28, 2016 About Jed Rothwell.
"Mad Defecating Pigeon" Jun 26th 2016 About Dewey Weaver (in The Playground)
"You appear as somewhat schizophrenic... (and mad)" Jun 23rd 2016 About Dewey Weaver.
"Deeply unethical business persons, somewhat stupid, very angry and generally what we in Sweden call "skitstövlar" (=dirty boots, but translates better into a**holes)" Jun 25th 2016 About Dewey Weaver and others.

I can't recall that the guy who made all those statements (and many similiar ones) ever got banned.

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The user's last post here was this one. Sep 29th 2016. It continued his habit of creating fake links to original posts at the top, with, often, offensive usernames substituted for the real user. He wrote about me "vomiting dog shit all over the place? ... and "go talk to the dog prophet of yours ... she might have a clue)."

Fortunately, I don't have a "dog prophet" or bitch, or I might actually take offense at that. There were many posts where deliberate effort was made to insult not just me, but my religion. However, I will give him this. He never attempted to insult my mother. He also has not attacked my children, so the man did have some boundaries. (One of the Wikipedia fanatics did go way beyond limits on "rationalwiki." And when it was tolerated by mods, that's when I did abandon that wiki, though I still have admin privileges there, not that it means much. That is a joke wiki, run by ... better not said.)

Banned? I don't know. Probably not, though. His last blog post was on September 11, 2016.

Besides the above, there are many posts where he was green-inked. See this, which shows 15 posts where text was replaced with Xs. Some green ink was signed by Alan Smith, but left severe insult in place, just removing, probably, a "bad word." In other words, only a narrow kind of "civility" was being enforced.

Quote from Alan Smith

Forty-Two Those comments were made before my time I suspect. I'm relatively new here, propelled into a post which (while I never declined it) I never asked for. My tin hat has (so far) only a few dents. BTW, just for the record, Abd's blockage was nothing to do with me, as has been made clear by Admin elsewhere.

The posts were not "before his time." He was already a moderator, and already handling some of the problems with this user.

Alan Smith does appear to be a newcomer. His account was registered Nov 10th 2015
However, the oldest post in his post search is Jun 25 2016. Search is broken. Using a different search, his first post was Feb 27th 2016
Alan mentioned "moderator" in this post, from May 31, 2016. This was about the Playground, which could be considered more like the neighborhood bar, rowdy, but ... the complaints were about an outing that, in fact, may have drive away an important user.
I don't find any post where the appointment of Alan as a moderator was announced or discussed. I don't wonder at it: responsible owner of a company supporting iindependent research, and 71 years old. Experience at managing a community, creating consensus? Probably not, but most people who get involved with this field don't have that experience.

There is a discussion of Forum rules here. And what I see there is totally normal when people without community organizational experience try to do this. Typically, nothing happens. It actually takes skill to facilitate the formation of a consensus and to maximize it. Unaided, the forum software militates against it.

Staff shows current team members. Eric Walker shows there as a Super Moderator, but his user display is only "Verified User." Strange. I don't recall seeing him listed in Staff before.
The Members List shows all members, in order of Post count, and other measures are shown. I find it enlightening to compare users by posts, and likes (likes show a response from another user and is a kind of measure commonly used on social media sites. Most users, however, simply don't push that button even when they like something.

This site should have more moderators, because with more moderators, it's easy for a mod involved in some conflict to recuse. That is how it's done, in theory, on Wikipedia, and understanding of this used to be wider. Admin blocks a user for a day. User gets pissed at admin and insults him up and down. Can the admin then block him for longer? Not if policy is followed. The admin steps away, lets another admin handle it. It can be quite difficult to handle a dispute when a party in the dispute is attacking you. However, it can be done, and I wrote policy for it on Wikiversity. Which was then basically ignored.... (Basically, action, if necessary, can be taken under a declaration of emergency, even when the admin is involved, provided that the action is promptly appealed for review, not just hidden.... This is what police do, in fact.)

Quote from Rigel

Please double check I think you are quoting yourself or mixing quotes someone else. I see you as a friend. If I said this and you can find (as a direct quote from me) it I will write you a very humble apology. But I really think I did not (could not). For the simple reason I do not think like that. I think you are mixing up a post with a user I have not seen for a while. I was at the time referencing the simple crap that people were saying to discredit you. Please double check. If I did... I do not know what to say. I can not think I would say something like this even in a mixed context as it goes against everything I stand for. Please find the discus.

It is linked in my post, at the top, and, yes, you did write what I quoted. What you posted here was mangled; what your post shows, mangled, is what you wrote ("Adb," misspelled, and then my response to that). I do consider you a friend or at least friendly. And you misspelled my name again in your large type "Adb, I did not write the above." Obviously, I failed to communicate, though I don't know how you became confused, since my post was apparently correctly formatted. The misspelling is not a big deal.

For convenience, your original post. My reply.