Science/Engineering/Technical forums

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... IOZ_aMrKos


This was shot by Vice/Motherboard early last fall. Heavily edited from dunno 20-30 hours of shot video, to their tastes, of course.
I have to say, I approve, I had no idea how they'd find a way to make the crazy amount of different stuff we showed them into something half-coherent. But this is truth as I see it - which isn't always the case for journalism. Xavier and Gaspard (and editors, who I'm sure slaved long and hard) - thanks guys! Great job, beer's on me.

You ought to turn on registration. There are people who want to sign up for the board.

I wanted to talk to you about that one. Yes, a lot of people want to sign up - I got maybe ~~ 50+ requests so far today in the mail - so many I had to resort to a canned reply that I'd get back to them in a day or few. I have no idea who they are - some seem like they might be a positive, some seem to think they just need to be members to read the thing, and might, well, kind of pollute the place - utter beginners at everything with questions they're just too lazy to google types. What do we want here? Please, everyone who cares should chime in. I don't want to just turn on registration - you should have seen some of the mail requests, is all I can say (obvious nut jobs to trolls), and last time we got spambots instantly. But sure, we'd like more of "guys like us", certainly, to liven up the place. Until I hear a consensus from some of the other guys, I'll continue to slowly add newbs by hand, and see how they work out. If it's only a few at a time, and someone goes nutso - the mods can "take them out" more easily than if I let in 100's at a time, or that's my thinking at the moment. But actually I'm not thinking much, it's been a really, truly, crazy day. I need a new delete key finger - over 4k messages so far from that video. Way over, I wasn't counting, just counting pages full. Just the rate of notifications ate all my bandwidth!

First thing I would do is upgrade the captchas used but the site software to the newest. The new ones work very well.

As for who do we want? Well, anyone.

People will filter themselves out. 95% will sign up and post one or two posts or only come back with a tech question. I am guilty of that on a couple forums.

Then we will have probably 1-2% crackpots who think free energy is real and HHO is going to save the world. Those people are easily deleted from existence.

Another 2% will just be dumber than dirt.

The rest might be useful!

But in general it is just too hard to get in here. When people cant even find instructions how to sign up they lose interest.

yep
we want doers and/ or thinkers who have something to contribute to science.
the tin hatters
and loonies are well catered for on other sites

but Doug I sympathise you need to do what you need to do
and that probably is not being a full time gatekeeper keeping the creepy crawlies from hijacking a very good site.

anything to help

John

Hi guys. Sorry I've not been around much recently. Thought I might make this contribution: Folks here are here because you have personal knowledge of their previous activities/contributions. So, clearly you need to expand your criteria if you're going to let people from further afield come in. The alternative I think would therefore be something that can substitute for that, perhaps they lodge with you what their first introductory post will say, and you can then politely indicate it is not quite the background you're after here, or set them up and get them posting.

Hi, Since this story has gone "Nuclear", so to speak, being picked up by news publications worldwide, I suspect this is just the beginning of many, many requests. I have seen some "captchas" that require you to perform mathematical computations before you can get in. I wonder if there is one that requires you to answer a tailored list of questions? If so, could one be constructed containing pertinent, physics, electronics, machining, etc. questions that would require some prior knowledge or extensive "digging" on the part of the applicant. This would maybe filter out most of the "link clickers". Of course if it is difficult enough, I may not be able to get in myself. -bill

Ok guys, heard and I hope understood. Here's my plan - for the moment, I'll keep it manual (maybe Jerry could help me with the better captcha stuff), because the number who'd have joined would have taken down our servers with mostly bull - and just looked like they wanted to ask questions more appropriate over on the fusor.net forums - so those I direct over to there - that was the deal PaulS and I made to start with - they get grade school, we're post-grad.

The ones who can't send a message without mentioning JFK assination, UFO's or other conspiracy theories, sorry pal, we don't need you - and as pointed out, they already have plenty of places to spew their stuff.

I will just start letting in the ones who are at least not obviously completely crazy, and as Jerry says - if they have nothing to say, they self eliminate or the mods take them out - I'll try to keep it to manageable numbers/day. I'm also going to create a new subforum for electrochemistry, as someone who is already a member, but non posting, is expert there and has been sending me cool stuff in email - he really needs an appropriately named sub-forum for his stuff.

And hey, only about 100 more requests and messages today so far, so that truly was a 15 min fame thing. But some of them are serious/scary - I now have 3 offers to do TV series, one book offer, and an offer to donate money from a large charitable org. Not sure how real any of that turns out, and frankly, I don't want to be a TV personality, write another book (isn't this enough?) or take any money with either strings attached or any promise of success - we've avoided that so far, one of the reasons being - everyone else in the alt-energy business that trolls for bucks, so far, has been a fake. We. are. not. fake. No need to get painted with that brush, IMO, though it sure would be nice to have a decent lab assistant to push things along quicker - the limit isn't currently equipment, though there are a few minor pieces I'd like to get - it's hours in the day, primarily.

There is all this other stuff to do on a farmstead. I don't even really need a lab tech - if someone would do all that other stuff and free up my time. We'll just have to see how it all rolls out.

OK, I let in about 14 guys so far, but turned reg off again as a couple of bots got in while I was doing it - and a couple people not smart enough to read we use real names here - they might be gone quick, depending. I think real names are important so as to give credit where it is due for any ideas that might be put forth here - it's kind of the point of open source, part of the payback for being a contributer is credit for the good things you do. If you can't understand that - you don't belong here.

Wow... In under the wire... WHOO!