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1. Your house, your rules. Play god if you wish, or appoint demigods to pre-mod.
2. I've been temporarily suspended elsewhere for straying into politics or religion. Served time on the benches, returned to the fray, and eventually became friends with the moderator's family. No problem. Publish the rules and apply them evenhandedly.
Aha, a proper democracy, not that fake European stuff! Better yet. The role of the State in a proper ….
an organization or situation in which everyone is treated equally and has equal rights
Fortunately in the case of an on-line forum you have the possibility of realtime consultation with the populace, so you can encourage your members to report whatever they consider offensive, and respond to the majority vote.
Why not offer a vote on every posting: useful, interesting (includes controversial) , amusing, wrong, trolling, offensive.
Before uttering an outright ban you can PM anyone who has been consistently voted "offensive", but more importantly you could have a Timewasters Corner into which you shuffle any emergent trolls. The sting is that anyone labelled as a troll will be automatically posted to TC until bailed out by his peers.
It may make sense to separate new & unique theories/ideas from more traditional scientific principles. It is up to you on how you wish to do so.
When doing that you’re publicly humiliating and embarrassing people.
OK so long as the next Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Pasteur, Lavoisier, Einstein, Bruno, Galileo, Columbus, Snow, Ross or Higgs isn't considered to be "the wrong crowd".
Bloody mavericks, challenging the Establishment. Like those upstart Wrights who persisted with their lunatic obsession long after the American Academy of Science held a peer review and solemnly pronounced "there is no conceivable military use for the airplane".
If you only stick to mainstream science, and don't invite controversy, aren't you just providing a homework channel for people too lazy to open a textbook or even use Google?
Yes, that's the whole point, but they won't see it that way. There's nothing a troll likes more than to be a victim of persecution.
I don’t want to listen to people from the flat earth society try to prove that I’m closed minded.
QuoteI don’t want to listen to people from the flat earth society try to prove that I’m closed minded. any more than Columbus's detractors didn't want to listen to crackpots determined to sail over the edge to their doom.
The point is that mavericks make progress.
The rest of the herd just keep grazing over the same ground - and occasionally stampeding over a cliff.
I don't think Einstein ran any experiments, although I assume he was a competent mathematician. What people think of as his greatest accomplishment today is not what he was awarded the Nobel prize for.
I don't think Einstein ran any experiments, although I assume he was a competent mathematician.