Cap’n Refsmmat’s Blog of Doom

So it seems a thread on SFN inspired me to create Alex’s Law of Internet argumentation. I’d like to elaborate a bit on that, and propose a new Law or two:

• Alex’s First Law
  As soon as an online discussion becomes an argument, the participants will never admit they are wrong, no matter how strong the evidence against them. Winning an argument fairly is impossible.
• Alex’s Second Law
  Upon reading something that flies in the face of accepted science or reason, the educated layman will immediately make an attack on the semantics of it, as he does not understand enough science or logic to make a more detailed response. Inevitably, the discussion will shift to the meaning of one or two key words rather than focusing on the science or logic.
• Alex’s Third Law
  It is far easier to attack an argument by quoting one of the Laws of Argumentation than it is to actually construct a logical response.

  First Corollary: Using a Law of Argumentation (this includes laws such as Danth’s and Godwin’s) as a substitute for logical argumentation is justification for using Alex’s First Law against you.

  Second Corollary: Using Alex’s First Law to win an argument immediately makes you a victim of the First and Third Laws.

A list of the other Laws of Argumentation

I’ve been a moderator here at SFN for almost four years now, and an administrator for about three. (The promotion to administrator was rather ad-hoc and I’m not entirely sure when it happened in retrospect; one day blike needed help fixing something in vBulletin and he promoted me so I had access to the right bits of the admin control panel.)

Over this time I have collected various bits of wisdom about moderating and participating in discussions on Internet forums. As SFN moves ahead with new plans and new ideas for the future, I thought it best to write some of my thoughts down.

Read more »

WordPress MU on blogs.scienceforums.net has now been upgraded to WordPress MU 2.7. You should notice that your admin screen has been drastically re-vamped
and re-shinied.

If you notice any odd problems, detail them here (with the error message) and I’ll try to fix them ASAP.

Back in November 2007 we had 5,977 posts made on SFN during the entire month. Not bad, although at our peak in May 2005 we had 12,000. Well, I just checked the numbers, and in the last month we had 7,521 posts.

We’re making definite progress. Our goal now is to increase our growth rate even more so SFN can be a productive and vibrant community. My personal goal is 500 posts per day — 15,000 posts per month.

Hey, we might be able to pull it off.

Over on SFN, we’ve been interested in figuring out how to stimulate growth and post volume to allow SFN to expand. It’s an interesting challenge — we have four large competitors (that I know of), and there is no simple “how to get more posts” procedure that we can follow. It’s a seat-of-the-pants venture.

To get a better handle on what we’re dealing with, I’ve compiled a graph and some handy statistics.
Read more »

For those of you interested in how many people visit your blog, go to your blog admin panel and click Plugins. You should see a plugin called FireStats enabled — just activate that and head to Dashboard->FireStats and you should be able to see all the stats you’d ever desire. (It only starts counting when you enable it, so you’ll see 0 hits at first.)

Have fun.

Some of you might be wondering how we linked SFN and WordPress together. Others are just glad that it does work. For those of you that wonder, here’s the answer.

WordPress and vBulletin don’t integrate easily. (There are plugins for each to make them integrate, but we use WordPress MU — the multi-user edition.) We decided (or rather, dave decided) that the best way to do it would be to hack WordPress to use vBulletin’s user database.

This required writing a WordPress plugin that overrides WordPress’s native login functions using vBulletin’s system. We then disabled WordPress’s own login page and forced it to redirect to vBulletin’s, since WordPress doesn’t know how to create a new session in vB’s system.

From there it was just a matter of beating WordPress with a stick until it worked the way we intended it to.

If you’re interested in being able to integrate WordPress MU and vBulletin yourself, ask and I might be able to help.

I just updated the SFN blogs to the latest version of WordPress MU (1.3.3, which corresponds to WordPress version 2.3.3) for both security reasons and the new features it brings.

Most notably, WordPress 2.3 now allows tagging — you can “tag” your posts with various labels the same way you can put it in categories. It’s up to you how you use them (or if you use them at all), but tags are a fairly big Internet fad and they’re rather handy for organization. I’m testing them out on this post.

Also, there is now a WordPress plugin installed called Spam Karma 2 that should help fend off spam on your blogs. Head over to the Plugins section of the WordPress Admin screen and enable the plugin to use it. It works out-of-the-box by capturing spam, and you can see the latest “harvest” by going to Manage->Spam Karma 2->Recent Spam Harvest.

Report any problems you have with WordPress here.

We’re now offering free blogs to everyone on SFN. If you have 50 posts and would like to talk about something science-related (not in every post, but in general, e.g. “at the lab today we…”), sign up!

A big thanks to dave for working out how to connect WordPress and vBulletin. If you find any problems, post them here or on the forums.