Clearance Items

Quote from sifferkoll

Clear enough ... The pecking order of your farm is settled. Different people - different rules... It certainly will please the Rossi-haters and I suppose that is part of the game we play, right?

It is clear, but not in the way you describe it. At the top of the pecking order are people who do actual experiments and people who make well-reasoned arguments and marshal a lot of facts, possibly drawing upon specialized knowledge. At the bottom of the pecking order are people who make only catcalls, who refuse to engage with the details of discussions, and who rely upon personal attacks of other forum members to change the focus of the thread. Mixed somewhere in the middle are people who have inside information to share and people who make interesting points but whose intemperance largely detracts from what they have to say. You may not agree that this is what the pecking order is, but it seems pretty clear to me that this is the case. This pecking order has nothing to do with Rossi and everything to do with the quality of people's contributions in terms of the perspective they bring, their willingness to engage details, their willingness to respond to moderator requests and their willingness to help keep this place a pleasant one. Obviously those who show through their actions that they will go out of their way to make things unpleasant for others will not gain much goodwill for their efforts.

That comment was not about this thread but rather about behavior in the forum at large. But this thread does not provide an occasion for being a jerk. Some people want a rowdy forum, where it is ok to intentionally disrupt discussions and be antisocial. We on the LENR Forum team do not want such a forum. We don't want a stuffy forum, but there's a big difference between a forum where people can get away with being antisocial and a forum that is not stuffy.

I'll reiterate that encouragement. Anyone dissatisfied with how this place is run should check out Kev's forum and see if it is better suited to their interests and goals.

I don't recall you posing that question to me, specifically. I probably missed that it was directed to me. But to address it: I don't really agree with the premise. I could be wrong, and at one point I think I agreed with the sentiment. But now my sense now is that "hyperskeptics" and "pseudoskeptics" are not dangerous and do not need to be kept out of forums. The truth is the truth; it can be obscured for a while, but eventually, hopefully, it will out, whatever it is. If such people succeed in obscuring it, perhaps unintentionally, or maybe intentionally, they can only do so much.

But the real difficulty lies in where to draw the line between sincere and insincere skeptic. I think people are complex, and there probably isn't anyone who is all one or the other. The difference between the two is often one of varying degrees of laziness at different times of the year. Attempting to separate them out does not feel like an easy thing to do. Making an issue of it would just be a distraction. Let people put forward weak arguments if they like. The weakness will be clear to everyone.

Zephir_AWT : I encourage you to seek out another forum. Please go. You will not be happy here. We are not going to bend to your wishes, so you should find another place that will cater to them. You will never get back the time that you have already devoted to complaints about how things are being done here, and we are not interested in doing things the way you'd like them to be done. It seems like a fruitless effort.

That does not seem like a very promising approach, to be honest. I guess only time will tell if the LENR Forum team will yield and bend to your wishes.

I do not mind not being in your good graces.

I am certainly not the main moderator here or acting as the main moderator. It is entirely a team effort, and I have no privileged role. Alan and I work closely together, and Barty and Rends have helped out as well. Your complaints about my moderation will no doubt be considered on their merits.

You and anyone else who find Mary annoying are free to block her. In fact, while you are still here and have not yet left for a more enlightened forum, I fully encourage you to block her if you find her distracting. At that point she will no longer bother you at all. I do not think she actually posts much to the same threads that you do, so I suspect this is a nonissue. Nonetheless, blocking is a great feature when made use of.

You and anyone else are at liberty to start a new thread looking at one of the papers in Jed's library. In fact I think you do from time to time. If that does not attract the attention of the majority of posters, it is because they are discussing some other topic that has more of their attention; perhaps a basic one, although often a technical one.

Mary may yet get the boot for misbehavior of some kind or ignoring Alan or something, but she won't get the boot because of the views she holds about LENR. We should set aside that thought.

Your idea about decentralized moderating of threads is an interesting one. I have no idea how that would turn out in practice or whether it would be a good idea.

I do find some amount of satisfaction in protecting this forum from those such as yourself who would impose your way upon it against the wishes of the LENR Forum team. But what you call complex rules are largely a description of what we've already been doing, described as best as I can describe it. The main recent innovations are the Playground thread (Rends's idea), this thread and the two-week bans for ignoring moderator warnings. For some time now we already had valued forum members and less valued ones, and we did not blindly apply rules irrespective of context and the personalities involved. I've simply attempted to put the existing approach into words as best as I can as the topic has come up.

There was a time a year or two ago when you and several others had more or less free reign, with Alan spread thin and only him to heroically deal with a flood of misbehavior, and at that time this place was incredibly unpleasant. My hope is that LENR Forum is now a little more pleasant for people with the knowledge and skills we seek to attract.

I don't know where you got the impression that I don't have an opinion about things or that I try to come across that way. I think this is you trying to read too much into things, when I've said pretty much what I think in posts here and on Vortex.