Nodes of Science & Skepti-Forum Newsletter April 2016

Nodes of Science & Skepti-Forum Newsletter April 2016

April 27, 2016 · by · in Announcements

Nodes of Science and Skepti-Forum have undergone many changes in the last while. Many of those changes are likely to cause some confusion, so an announcement of some of those changes is due.

If you want to skip reading the rest, these are the three main points:

As much of the Skepti-Forum project, including the website and wiki, has come under Nodes of Science, the main direction has been towards consolidation, minimalisation, and trimming. On the backend, Skepti-Forum is bloated with plugins and redundant or outdated information. With so much bloat, our server had difficulty staying online.

To solve the issue of bloat and to work on making the projects more user-friendly, we have combined many of the Nodes of Science and Skepti-Forum projects and changed some of the platforms.

Firstly, our previous WordPress Skepti-Forum blog has been integrated into our Nodes of Science website. All of the previous articles redirect to the current versions on Nodes of Science. While I am still going through the articles to fix broken links and update information, most everything should be easy to find and use. If something cannot be found, please email us at admin@nodesci.net and we’ll see if we can find it for you.

Secondly, as we transition the Skepti-Forum blog to the Nodes of Science website, we’ll be transitioning the Skepti-Forum domains to our new Skepti-Forum message board at skeptiforum.net. Since the Skepti-Forum Project is now a collection of autonomous projects, having our own hub separate from other social networks will likely be useful in coordination and communication. Further, the philosophy of Skepti-Forum has always been to be accessible to the public and to be as inclusive as possible. Sharing thoughts and engaging in reasoned discussion is much easier in an open forum than working with staff to post on a blog. Our Skepti-Forum hub should be a place where anyone can share with as few obstacles as possible.

Third, our Skepti-Wiki is converting to our Nodes of Science Wiki. One of the main reasons for this change is to avoid dealing with a cumbersome database. With the new wiki, the public can much more easily export the data to import it elsewhere. There is no need to wait for administrator approval or help. Further, our old wiki was so encumbered with outdated information it was becoming near useless. We still have far to go with the new wiki, and the current task is still on transferring data over, but hopefully soon we will have something much cleaner, organised, and user-friendly.

Lastly, I know some of these changes are going to cause some confusion and there is still so much undone; however, I hope you all can be patient as we undergo these renovations. If anyone is dissatisfied or if anyone would like to do things their own way, we still have the previous databases and archives you can get access to. I would be willing to help anyone who is interested in forking these projects.

Again, everyone is welcome to email us at admin@nodesci.net with any questions. You can also discuss this newsletter on our new forum discussion thread.

Photo credit: In Hwa Kim
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