I just checked the only science forum that has more members/traffic than this one. But radically censored: for example, not one single thread on the Iran conference or about David Duke's presense there, or about ethnic issues, immigration, or anything whatsoever of the slightest deviation from mainstream thought. It appears any such threads are immediately deleted and the poster banned, sniper-style: a quiet take-out, no explanation, you just secretly vannish. I should know, I was banned with my first post, no explanation! This forum, in my opinion, deserves more traffic then that other one. I suggest members promote it at Google Groups, school, college, etc., get the word out! Create Sciforums.com bumperstickers, fliars, posters, etc. Do a billboard on the highway: follow all the laws of course. put fliars on doorsteps, car wipers, etc., whatever is legally permitted. Get a radio endorsement AM frequency, etc. Use your imagination. Have a nice day Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Well, you do present threads which are political in nature rather than scientific in nature. Science forums have no reason to allow political threads to take center stage in their forums. And political threads do do tend to take center stage. WE&P are two of the busiest subforums here. The other two are Free Thoughts and Religion. You are under a misconception about the nature of this site. It's a common misconception and one which is furthered by the very name of the site itself. You see Sciforums as a science forum. It's not. It's an "intelligent community" and this means that the field of discussion is open to far more things than just science, although science is and always will be one of the primary reasons for this site's existence as is evidenced by the large number of science subforums. As to the thread topic of desiring more traffic, I'd prefer to see more traffic of a specific kind. We get a large number of crackpots. These other science forums you speak of know about Sciforums, and when they ban some crackpot from their forum, they often send them a message with the address to this site so as to forestall them from simply rejoining their forum with a new username. We also have a large number of bored kids who just love posting off-topic and chatty remarks. We have far too many people with short attention spans who seem to think a post of more than a few sentences is way too long to read, and yet they still find themselves compelled to post anyhow. Usually they will mention how unbelievably long the post is and how they can't believe that anyone could ever read that many words in one sitting and they guess what the topic might be about from the thread title and the first few words of the presented essay. What we need is more people willing to get their hands dirty by digging into some really interesting threads. The old days of this forum were full of people like this. Posters who cared about what they said. How it was read. People who would stop and think before just puking up their words en masse. Nowadays threads grow from 1 page to 15 in a matter of hours. Full of snappy one-liners. Sigh. I'm not sure if advertisment would draw the right sort of crowd. How would we target the specific market we're interested in? (And, by the way, academia is not the proper target audience. Academia tends to like the stuffy forums which you have expressed a distaste for. Sciforums is more about the enlightened amateur.) And who would pay for all this advertisment? Sciforums has a large database and a good presence on google. This is our advertising. And it's absolutely free.
I do both. Politics are reserved to their designated sub-sections. Thus the control is maintained. Not if people just don't go to those sub-sections: it would be as if it did not even exist. My criticism was about the use of objective language, and argumental fallacies, esp. ad hominem: I stress that it's the data that needs to be discussed more than the messenger of it. Most humans can't do this: irrational by nature. This is obvious just by visiting a random sample of the tousands of politics forums out there: constant name calling: almost no discussion of the data itself. I don't know about banning "crackpoters," but I do know that they ban those scientific topics which are taboo and those that discuss them. Best example is human intelligence: scientific research is endless, but topic is taboo: gotta censor it. I concur. I concur. And I speculate that by simply requiring objective language over excessive subjectivity, 50% of the waste posts/text would be eliminated: Occam's Razor, losely speaking. If you mean pure Professional level data exchange, I actually do prefer that to amateurs: I would just read and never speak (I'm not a Professional scientist, just an armchair one). I am radically pragmatic and stoic: just want the hard professional data, nothing else. Basically, I believe I have a certain "enlightenment" about various facts and ways of thinking, and I like to share these aspects with those that don't. Selfish and egotistical? Sure: I'm here to promote my own world views because that is how I like the world to be: and everyone else does the same.
what say you about people like me who type with exactly one finger? don't you think you are being a little harsh and judgemental?
spend 2 hours memorizing where the keys are, and touchtype. it will be hard going at first, but will become second nature soon enough. 7 seconds to type this.
This is why. I was trying to figure out if you had only one finger.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
158,000 words over 6 months, but a novel is a creative process, typing really fast doesn't mean you could complete one significantly quicker.
giving you the benefit of a 14 hour day that makes 62 words per hour. i think i type a little faster that one word a minute.
Well, by your reckoning it should have taken me about an hour to write thisPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Like I said, writing a novel is a creative process, there are periods of intense thought and periods of inactivity recharging the brain cells. I can write my ideas down just as fast as I can make them, point is to make them in the first place.
you don't really need to tell me about the creative process, i used to write programs in basic. i'm sure you have spent all day in front of your typewriter and nothing comes out. other times you can't seem to type fast enough. some passages you will have to rewrite 5 or more times others are shining examples of sheer brilliance. what were your novels about?
First one was a pure fantasy novel attempting to expose the fallaciousness of religion and belief in gods by using analogies, hence a story inhabited by time-travelling intelligent cakes with esp, talking goats and a motley crew of surreal human characters. Second one is a crime novel. Shattered by his wife’s infidelity with his best friend, and fed up with his whores and lifestyle, erotic artist Peter plans revenge on his friend and reconciliation with his wife. Events don’t turn out as he wished, when an ex girlfriend decides to take her own revenge, on all three. Cover blurb: In a well observed tale about love and deceit, jealousy and revenge, reward and punishment and not without a good dose of scathing irony and dry wit, Kat Chamis explores the hidden motives, confused emotions and perverted lusts driving the surreal characters, in a clandestine tour of an underbelly world inhabited by whores and conmen and skin-trading gangsters on the island of Aphrodite, where the sex is hardcore and the violence extreme.
