Clearance Items

  • 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.

  • Is it the official forum policy to have double standards when it comes insults and ad-homs? Ie. one standard regarding Rossi et al and another for everybody else?

    Yes. They answered that very clearly a few weeks ago when they said explicitly "some farm animals are more equal than others".

  • This is enforcing a minimum of decorum in a rowdy forum, which you appear intent on disrupting.

    This is the thread designated for such discussions, so how is it an intent on disruption to engage in the rowdy back & forth on this thread?

  • 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.

  • Your right. I believe we finally reached a conclusion ... (you did in the end answer my question)


    "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others" sums it up pretty well.

    The mods have even explicitly upheld this as a standard. I see that it is being characterized as a "graduated standard" rather than a double standard. Oh well, whattya gonna do? Might as well go on over to "Cold Fusion" and start afresh, as encouraged by Eric.


    https://disqus.com/home/channel/coldfusion/

  • 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.

    All we need now is that "in-between" forum that I posted to you about but you haven't responded. But the reality is there would be no interest, so I suppose that means the big W, 'whatever'....

  • 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.

  • Well Siffer.

    You get 100 points for stating the obvious. If you want the other 900 points to win your rubber ball maybe its a good idea to stop the discussion at this point since it won't get you nowhere...

    Ah well, nowhere except being banned again.


    This is unfortunately true but from time to time someone has to cut through the bullshit and remind everyone what's what, that there's conditioning going on etc

  • The gradual lost of coherence of this forum under Walker's moderation is apparent even from this very thread. Before year we got "Playground thread" - never before such a thing has been even needed, because the posters here were dedicated, with real interest about LENR and on-topic. Now we got a "Clearance thread", which supersedes it. Even from this evolution it's apparent, that the current establishment of moderators promotes clueless twaddling and frog&mice battles - but why? The moderation of wast amount of posts is counterproductive and time consuming - after all LENR patoskeptics threat their own business. Aren't they trying to sell the toys for amateur LENR researchers?


    This is proclamatively forum about LENR - so why to maintain threads for off-topic twaddlers or even LENR haters instead of banning them? If you have nothing to say about subject, why you should say it right here?


    Seneca: "He who is everywhere is nowhere."

  • 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.

  • On the contrary, I'm just showing that your effort is fruitless, Walker. You're making an enemies (both yours, both between posters mutually), because you cannot actually handle the social aspects of the forum.

  • 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.

  • Well, you're acting as a main moderator here for more than year, it's time for some feedback and judging of your activity here - so you got it.

    The forum owners may consider it or may not - but it is my last comment in this matter.


    Edit: The current evolution of this forum resembles the attitude of EU leaders with respect to Islamist immigrants for me. I.e. the welcoming the people who are essentially hostile to ideas of their hosts in the name of diversity. The consequences are easily foreseeable.

  • 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.

  • In recent time many interesting articles about cold fusion emerged, Jed Rothwell's library is also full of food for thoughts, which were never discussed it here..

    But it has no meaning to discuss it deeply here, because the forum is flooded with bored twaddlers without links and qualification, who are only interested/engaged in frog&mice battles with patoskeptics. One person like mary yugo is thus capable to decrease the level of the forum a lot due to secondary effect of many his 2nd grade followers and their 3rd grade sock-puppets. Soon or later every discussion will get burrowed with off-topic clueless posts in this way.


    So if you really feel the urgent need to keep wide profile of this forum, it's time for establishing of forum hiearchy, i.e. the enabling the privately moderated threads, which would serve as an elite clubs for people, who need to engage in specialized coherent matter of facts discussion and who could occasionally lock their threads from further posting. In another words, if you cannot maintain the order and focus to subject yourself, you should allow its keeping for another layer of delegated moderators. From what I can see, the current development of this forum apparently goes against such a need.

  • 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 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.


    Everyone can see (count) that you are the one who obviously gets your juices running on setting the rules, giving members different grades and privileges depending on your whims and their bias, etc. And then of course you seem to love the policing part of it way more than anyone else. All this is kind of strange for a guy that made a name for himself specifically by not having any opinion at all about anything .


    What kind of person is more interested in implementing complex moderation rules than the subject itself (except maybe for very narrow technical pseudo discussions/speculations) - especially the social, psychological, political and economical implications of lenr tech? I don't get it. It does not compute. Or is it deliberate?

  • 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.

  • 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 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 the kinds of 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.


    That is an interesting twist. Is elevating Dewey to a "principal" and bringing that mad mary dog in your idea of pleasant? But I guess it is a question of bias? I get that your aim is to keep the Rossi specific discussions on a very narrow technical speculation level and avoid anything deviating from that track (like why? and who?). But I'm a little curious on why this is so important to you and why it is so incredibly important not to discuss motives (except speculation about Rossi et al) - when those, as always when it comes to humans - are fundamental.


    Maybe I'm wrong about you having no opinion. I should restate: You are very careful to have the exact calculation of an average opinion on the forum; which in this case is an clearly anti-Rossi, slightly hopeful LENR (otherwise why be here at all and hard to attract Jed&Dewey - and you got the mary dog and others to cover the extremes) but still sceptical. And as I quoted before, you said it yourself in the stackexchange wet boy presentation;


    Quote

    Enthusiast with questions about physics from time to time. Since I’m not in much of a position to assess the validity of answers, I generally just pick the answer with the most votes after a certain amount of time has passed.





    In that context I find it hard to comprehend why you suddenly seem to put so much passion and work into the moderation role you so eagerly have taken on here. It is a bit creepy.

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