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Thursday, July 27, 2017

talk.origins evolves

The newsgroup talk.origins was created more than 30 years ago. It's been a moderated newsgroup for the past twenty years. The moderator is David Greig and the server, named "Darwin," has been sitting in my office for most of that time. I retired on June 30th and my office is scheduled for renovation so Darwin had to move. Another complication is that the moderator is moving from Toronto to Copenhagen, Denmark.

So talk.origins evolves and the server is moving elsewhere. Goodby Darwin.



14 comments :

phhht said...

Goodbye indeed. I hope talk.orgins won't be broken as badly as The Panda's Thumb.

Joe Felsenstein said...

PT is fairly broken, as a result of a move to different software. The old comments, which are mostly inaccessible, apparently do still exist and there is hope of restoring them. And making equivalents to the old Bathroom Wall and the current comments list.

All that can happen, if the PT owner can find a few people to help out who have the relevant skills. If ...

John Harshman said...

Darwin is dead and has been replaced by Beagle. Talk.origins was broken for a while during the replacement process, but DIG has now fixed it.

phhht said...

In my view, the primary reason for the brokenness of PT is the loss of the old comment system, sacrificed and replaced by that impotent travesty they run now (the same as here?).

I am doubtful that PT will ever return to its former self until and unless the comment system (not the comments- the commenting software) is restored.

Robert Byers said...

Did Talk. origins prevail?? I understand you couldn't do comments!
No debate means the good guys are frustrated in proving and settling the right answers.
I wish there was a greater debate forum. i can't find any. Most are blogs, with folks who don't agree with free speech concepts. Every side but more so the evolutionist side.
Talk origins was talking one way and at you as opposed too you.
I think alsi the evolutionist side has failed to make its intellectual case.
YEC and ID are going strong, intellectually, though have problems reacxhing audiences.
Its like the revolutionary war. The creationists, american armies, only need to stay in existence while the evolutionist armies, British, must win battles to prevail.
The evolutionists failing to prevail, as each year documents, shows they will lose.
in issues of science the accurate side should prevail and it should be seen in a progressive way. The opposition should be decaying.
This is not today's history.
YES please more forums/blogs on this greast, important, intellectual, contention on biological origins.
AND FREE UP THE PEOPLE. STOP censorship now!
Truth belongs to the people. Just censor abuse/malice.
Conclusions you don't like aree not MALICE/ABUSE. Thats oppressive and stupid and illegal.

William Spearshake said...

RB: "YEC and ID are going strong, intellectually, though have problems reacxhing audiences.
An excellent example of cause and effect.

Joe Felsenstein said...

There may be some plugins that can allow the order of comments to be temporal rather than threaded. And maybe even let the reader choose which. Having them threaded makes it hard to find the newest comments.

Here at Sandwalk the comments are threaded within each post, but there are (two!) sidebars that show the latest comments. That lets readers somewhat keep track. At PT, we need to implement a latest-comments box on the front page, and apparently there are possible ways.

But mostly it needs several people to spend time on it. With the old comments restored to old threads, with a lates-comments box, and with a Bathroom Wall to send blatant trolls and offtopic stuff to, we would come close to the old functionality at PT.

Unknown said...

beagle is a micro instance on AWS now. Darwin is sitting, powered off, disconnected, in my apartment next to me as I type.

Anonymous said...

You are one of the people behind talk origins? Well sir, you ruined my highschool ambition: I felt God was calling me to show the world that Evolution was a house of cards and delusion.

My intuition that agency and design could not result from blind events was not easy to overcome. Richard Dawkins was instrumental to grasping that possibility.

But talk origins was really the 'textbook' for my discovery of the scientific method. Not only did it open my eyes the breadth of information in science, it introduced me to how scientists think. That latter point was otherwise almost entirely absent from my education.

Thanks!

Rolf Aalberg said...

Me too. I don't care about PT any more, it just lost the appeal it once had.

Rolf Aalberg said...

Thumbs up!

AllanMiller said...

Haha! Who knew that my drivel was chattering away yards from Prof. Moran himself! Well, I did once, but I'd forgotten till now. Thanks to UofT for all the electricity!

Anonymous said...

Please maintain Talk Origins. It is a vital resource for extended explanations. I send all ignorants there en masse.

Joe Felsenstein said...

Do you perhaps mean the Talk Origins Archive web pages? Are those in the same place as the talk.origins newsgroup?