Alex has temporarily reactivated deleted forums

They are now "Moderated Forum[s]". And you just know that Alex is keeping a short leash and something will eventually happen and everything will end up nuked again.

PS- Also, no CDs.

[Ninshub]

I'm planning on staying here, pretty much exclusively, no matter what happens. Don't want to be at the mercy of one person anymore. Might post on the Skeptiko Show threads, depending on what happens there, and that's it.

Apparently Alex has reinstated some forums for a bit.

Personally I won't be going back, it's too volatile as to when the forums will be deleted again. Happy to help with the upkeep & growth of Psience Quest.

Apparently the Skeptiko "vision" has changed and it is no longer one I can identify with. If Pizzagate is a taste of things to come, I'm happy to stay away. 

I saw some posts which stretched logic to snapping point. The gist seemed to be that those who questioned the truth of that particular conspiracy theory were the very same people who were willing to believe in ghosts, etc. The inference being that if you believe in one then you should believe the other.

[Laird]

Laird - what you are doing is wonderful, and I hope will work successfully - will the end result be read-only, or will it be possible for people to continue a discussion in place?

Thanks, David. The end result will be read-only. I'm thinking of (somewhat) recreating the HTML under a subdirectory of the main psiencequest.net domain, maybe something like http://psiencequest.net/skeptiko-restore/ but I welcome suggestions. The HTML unfortunately won't be searchable except via Google - we might be able to integrate a site-specific Google search if Google still supports that.

The main problem with trying to integrate the scraped posts into this forum - as I wrote in another thread - is that they were scraped as HTML, and I doubt that MyBB supports raw HTML in its posts. I suppose I could write some sort of "translator" that converted the HTML to BBCode, but I'm not sure I have the stamina to go to those lengths. If anybody else wants to try this, then feel free.

After several conversations with Alex, I must say that I still don't understand why he wants to do this. Alex's actions seem terribly destructive of what he himself has built up over many years.

Yes, it's very strange. He had one of if not the premier forums for discussing these topics on the web - why would he destroy that?

[Laird]

I doubt that MyBB supports raw HTML in its posts.

I needn't have doubted, there's a plugin for it: https://community.mybb.com/mods.php?action=view&pid=16

I'm not sure though how we'd import the posts - perhaps directly into the database.