The letter from the staff is the best reason I’ve seen so far that the forum should not be reopened. If a group of intelligent rational people who are trying to save a place for discussion of rational thought, science, and so on, and sat down to write a letter to do so, this is NOT the letter they would have come up with.

In the medium/long germ I hope there will be a new and great Dawkins site. For the short term there probably should not be.

Dear Richard
We hope you will find time to read this letter, which is from all the forum staff.

We are all deeply saddened that the forum will be deleted in 28 days time. In just over 3 years, it has grown to become the busiest atheist forum on the Internet. On average since last October, the forum has been getting 3,000 posts per day, of which about 2,000 per day are focused on science, reason and your work. The front page average is a fraction of that at 200 – 300. The social posts on the forum only comprise about 1/10 of all posts per day so there is a great deal of substance being discarded.

Staff were told that the science and reason forum content would be migrated to the new site and we offered to help with this. Then 2 days ago, we were told that there was a change of plan and all the forum content would be deleted in 30 days. Members have been told that they can copy their posts and repost them on the new site. This is complete nonsense because it isn’t individual posts that make up the forum, it’s the discussion threads that are significant and members don’t have the ability to migrate whole threads across. That’s what the staff were going to do for them. This is now not going to happen and over 3 years worth of threads debunking creationism & woo, challenging theism, supporting new atheists etc will be wiped out.

Andrew and Josh have now announced that the forum has been made ‘read-only’ due to the inappropriate actions of staff. This is ‘spin’ at its finest as it fails to acknowledge that their own inappropriate actions resulted in this debacle in the first place. The announcement that the forum was shut down because some staff posted the letter sent to them and made some public complaints is nonsense. The letter was exactly the same as the one posted publicly to the members with the addition of letting staff know that their services wouldn’t be required at the new website. They also told staff what they shouldn’t do:
[snip – eg email Richard, inflame the users, start any petitions, relocate groups of users to other forums.]

We decided to post this letter on the forum as it explained succinctly that staff wouldn’t be required and also let people know that they shouldn’t expect staff to take any action on their behalf. Andrew and Josh removed the
letter and they could have also removed the staff’s permissions as they said they didn’t trust staff anymore. They didn’t have to make the forum ‘read-only’ for everybody in order to gag the staff. The fact is that they needed the staff to deal with all the complaints that would inevitably have been thrown at the forum for the next 30 days. In other words, they expected the staff to give up their free time to act as police and lavatory cleaners for a month, without a word of dissent themselves, and then just stand aside and watch the forum they’d worked so hard for be deleted. Not much to ask was it?

Since their announcement, you have made one yourself entitled “outrage” which contains copies of some insulting comments about Josh. None of these comments came from the RD forum. They were all posted on various other websites after the forum was locked. Someone has harvested these quote-mines from other websites and presented them to you as justification for locking the forum. Your announcement also contradicts the admin announcement which says that the reason the forum was locked was due to the staff.They are also saying that they aren’t trying to stop people from going off into other forums but right from the start, they prevented members from having any links/information in their signatures and changed the PM system to make it virtually unworkable so that members can’t contact each other easily.

Andrew and Josh could have handled this so much better if they had taken up the offer we made a while ago to advise them on how to make the transition. They don’t have any leadership skills or experience but several of us on the staff do this professionally and have years of experience managing change with large and diverse groups of people. This offer was ignored and instead, they have provided a textbook example of how not to do it. This also includes putting the blame on people for reacting badly to their ill-conceived actions. The fact that they either didn’t expect such a reaction or just didn’t care, serves to emphasise their ignorance of how to work with large groups of people and how to manage change.

We have all worked so hard to support your mission because we passionately believe in it. You and your work have been our inspiration to keep going on days when we were verbally abused and threatened by trolls. The staff are highly intelligent people but we were prepared to spend hours of our own time doing low-level and mundane moderating tasks to keep the forum organised, facilitate focused discussions and solve people’s technical problems. We were also able to use our skills and expertise in fostering a sense of community and ensuring that all people could post there, free from homophobic, sexist or racist abuse. That’s a significant part of why it has
become the most popular atheist forum on the Internet because it’s a lively, challenging and supportive environment.

The Foundation’s decision to remove the forum is one we deeply regret but we acknowledge that as volunteers, it’s not our concern. However, we could have used our skills and expertise to help develop the new discussion area, transfer content over and manage the transition for the membership as smoothly as possible. Andrew and Josh rejected that offer and as we were told recently that we weren’t allowed to contact you about any forum
matters, we weren’t able to make that offer to you personally.

At the moment, we feel deflated and dismayed while we watch the destruction of such a successful forum but despite that, we continue to wish you well and we sincerely hope that the new website is successful in achieving the Foundation’s goals, which is what were striving for with the forum.

Sincerely
The forum staff

Maybe the closing of RDF will result in more diversity, maybe RDF had become too big with over 85000 members, but I feel it acted as a “galaxy central” that got you started in your search for the like minded.

Still sad though.

It might change with the influx of refugees from RDF into a site supporting much more substantial discussions.
The amount of knowledge available at RDF to scientifically support the discussion with facts and literature references and therefore well reasoned arguments was sometimes quite astonishing in its depth and breadth.

As to advancing the discussion…I am just sad a very lively place of free discussion has met it untimely end.
The reaction by quite a few is of course exaggerated and displays withdrawal symptoms.
I find the reactions of the majority reflecting a sadness and an outrage against the willful and very sudden elimination of a place where all kinds of topics mainly related to science and the antagonism between science and religion could be discussed with vigour, always monitored not to cross over into attacking the person, but permitting to relentlessly attacking sometimes very stupid ideas.

Read through it, and you find that quite a few on the fence religious people found a place here to gain clarity about their position regarding their believes and their waning, overwhelmingly supported in their struggle by that community.

The same holds true for those who where willing to put their creationist faith to the test, and sometimes actually becoming convinced by the evidence presented.

That is one of the many reasons I cannot understand the desire to squash such a place to be replaced with a model to permit mainly posting opinions with from what I gather only limited space to have develop a full discussion, and heavily gated, not monitored.

And with that statement, I hope to have advanced this conversation SEVERAL LIGHTYEARS towards a greater understanding of the ACTUAL TRUTH and stuff.

I do question your use of hyperbole as useful in making your point. I’m also aware, having been through organizational upheaval, that while there are ways of handling it that are worse than others, there is no good way. Even from what the moderators are saying about this (and yes, I have been reading some of that), this was far from the worst.

Why is it that folks – no matter of which persuasion, be it religious or non – are unable to refer to what was said in actuality, but simply cannot refrain from misinterpretation to make what? point?

“acting like any good tinpot dictator.”
is what I said, and if you cannot tell the difference between what I actually said and what you think I said, any further discussion is beside the point.

Your further comments also indicate that you either did not read my statement or do not want to understand what I said.
Again, with that kind of attitude it is nonsense to try to engage in further discussion.

I have quite a bit of sympathy for the moderators (and have said elsewhere that I hope they end up somewhere where they “own” their work), but almost nobody gets consulted on whether they continue employment when management makes changes. And yes, that includes volunteers. That’s one of the drawbacks of working for someone else. It’s sad and painful, but it doesn’t require any slavering monsters to happen.

Those discussions were cut short when the announcement came that the forum would be closed, the mods told they were all let go and no attempt to contact Dawkins would be permitted.

Information by mods actually warned them off from participating in any discussions.

The mods were as surprised as anybody else by this decision to shut the forum down, and replace it with an apparently heavily censored “reply to the frontpage news” platform.

This caused an avalanche of protests, as was to be expected, with invectives mostly directed at Josh.

Subsequently the forum was shut down to a read only site.

No reason was ever really given – except “streamlining” for the shutdown.

Dawkins was/is the host no doubt, but he employed the labour of volunteers as admins and mods, in the end keelhauling them for whatever reasons, without their input, acting like any good tinpot dictator.

That might be his prerogative, but having created the forum as a meeting place not by himself, but through the labour of those volunteers and the members, I question the wisdom, social and internet skills of Dawkins to interact with what might have been called his supporters, and the appropriateness of those actions by someone looking to help to create an awareness of atheism, and to help to create a pressure group to counteract the still increasing influence of religion in politics, education and the law.

My response to the announcement, that I caught early, on was anyway to not further participate in a to be censored “comment” site, that was far removed from what a forum can be – a platform for extensive discussion.

Sorry to see it go, it was sometimes enlightening to participate, sometimes depressing, but always challenging to your wit and intelligence – with exceptions, granted.