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Messages - JohnDavis

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "Soft" Merger
« on: December 17, 2016, 12:41:11 PM »
I will personally ship each member of the administration staff ice-cream bars. We are taking this very seriously now. This is our final offer.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Pre-Rowbotham flat Earth research?
« on: June 23, 2016, 02:41:07 PM »
There's a lot, and many are since Aristotle. I'm writing an article on it now and will come back and link it when its done.

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I'd like to know how the face of the moon magically turns about at exactly the right speed so that it always faces the Earth on a globe. What balderdash!

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Flat Earth Community / Re: What is the problem with Atheism?
« on: June 23, 2016, 02:17:56 PM »
My problem with atheism is that it delivers on none of the promises that support such a bold move.

They promise it is more reasonable, and yet I see as many fallacies come out of atheist reasoning as I do fundamentalist religion. They claim its equally moral, and yet I don't see this in the actions of atheists or out of non-religiously based groups in general like science. They say religion is so often hate based - and yet again the rhetoric of the atheist matches if not outstrips this hate. They are also a tyrannical belief - they will not tolerate religion existing side by side with atheism. They say there is some sort of war between religion and reason - this is patently against history and fact.

In general, I find the atheist is as faithful and dogmatic as any follower of a religion. They rely far more on how intelligent they think they are compared to folks they paint to look like they believe Zeus is throwing around lightning bolts. Mostly I'm against it because there is no real benefit. Like Love pointed out religion has served us quite well over the years. Atheism has yet to contribute anything. They believe what they do because they were taught it and gobbled it up whole.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "Soft" Merger
« on: June 23, 2016, 02:08:43 PM »
A bit ago we discussed the option of a soft merger where we would play nice with each other for a bit and see how that goes before going forward with something more permanent and dangerous.

I'd love to hear a bit about what you guys would hope to get out of it and we can move on from there if there is indeed interest on your side still.

Speaking as somewhat of an outsider: this forum has 2 advantages over the other one.

1. Better moderation.
2. Faster.

As long as those two things are maintained, I suspect most people would be happy. Regarding the moderation issue: almost every thread at the other site seems to turn into a poo slinging contest, with even the "moderators" egging it on, and often starting it.
I do worry the "faster" bit is due largely to having significantly less traffic and less data. Our site happens to run as fast when we are a similar load - the solution on my side may just be upping our hosting plan again. Between the two teams we can get over that minor hurdle though.

Moderation - spot on.

My only concern is that if we combine the forums there will be way too many people asking me questions. I kind of like a small forum environment, because the conversations can get a little more in depth.

As a wish list I would want my own Ask Tom Bishop section on the main site or on the forums (or maybe "Ask a Believer" or "Ask the Zetetic Council"), where people may submit questions and I can publish answers without feeling like I would need to be on the forums 24/7 catering to dozens of threads filled with dozens of people asking endless questions.
A valid concern.

An Ask Tom Bishop section on the new site is a great idea and would take almost no work on my part. I'll try to add it this week.


I do believe there is a bit of confusion here. I am talking about not merging the forums at first and simply having you guys act as a chapter of the main society, maintaining your autonomy. The large majority of folks on our site really don't see any benefit to the merger at all. This includes our entire userbase, as far as I can tell. Really its just me, Wilmore and Pongo that are for this. This will give them a chance to see what benefit there is.

The idea here in part would be to take advantage of some friendly cooperation across things like social media outreach and links to each others sites while at the same time allowing both sides to get accustomed to each other again and hopefully working through old hard feelings. Also, we'd have some time to discuss as a whole issues like branding, who hosts what, what role each of us will have in general and so on.

However, I'm really happy to see that the negative opinions of the merger were mostly due to a minority that have since left the forums (or have yet to voice in?) Perhaps this will change the feelings on the other site as well.

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Suggestions & Concerns / "Soft" Merger
« on: June 17, 2016, 07:21:32 PM »
A bit ago we discussed the option of a soft merger where we would play nice with each other for a bit and see how that goes before going forward with something more permanent and dangerous.

I'd love to hear a bit about what you guys would hope to get out of it and we can move on from there if there is indeed interest on your side still.

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Where is the edge?
« on: June 08, 2016, 01:49:25 PM »
I know Iris Taylor routinely brings folks to one of the "four corners" of the earth. I doubt its the edge though.

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Flat Earth Community / Re: Where is the edge?
« on: June 07, 2016, 08:53:31 PM »
Charles K. Johnson, Samuel Shenton and Rowbotham all thought the plane extended indefinitely. However, this is unknown.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Concerning your logo
« on: June 06, 2016, 01:59:10 AM »
I'm sure you guys don't care and its not worth pursuing or it could be fair use. As distasteful as some of his views are, he does have some good material in his books. Just thought you should know. I won't be back here for a bit likely as I'm pretty busy this week. Take care.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Concerning your logo
« on: June 06, 2016, 12:45:06 AM »
Sure. It is lying between a split in sections that concern "Giants are Real" and "The Flat Earth Bible." It certainly seems to lie with the Flat Earth Bible which starts off as him talking about the bible and his upbringing of skepticism towards it and moves towards Schadewald. Nothing really having anything to do with you.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Concerning your logo
« on: June 05, 2016, 11:51:10 PM »
I'm a bit familiar with CC by SA which is why I bring this up.In particular he has done none of the following:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

I'm also fairly sure its also not printed under CC by SA as its only listed as "All Rights Reserved" in the books front pages. Use of the image can be found in the section concerning the Flat Earth Bible.

I'm asking more as an effort to let you guys know. That, and if it Dubay's book was indeed share-alike we'd love to include it in our library. This looks to me like just unlicensed use of the image though.


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Suggestions & Concerns / Concerning your logo
« on: June 05, 2016, 11:21:27 PM »
I'm not familiar with this specific case of the license for Use and Share-a-like. Does use of it in and of itself make the work sharable?

I noticed there's a copy in Eric Dubay's Flat Earth Conspiracy; unless you guys gave him some other license for its use.

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I'm here because I said I was open to talks about unification, and I am. I'm here because I care about the Flat Earth and the Flat Earth Society.

I fully realize that both our user bases may not be interested. So I'm also here to find out if yours is. From my brief talks on irc, it seems like you are interested but we would have to renegotiate terms.


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I bring it up because one of your users came to our site and requested this functionality. I assume it was important to him, so passed it on.

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I've been told not to take you seriously, so I won't. Who can I assume is my contact in these matters?

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I have no harsh feelings towards tfes.org. I like the majority of you quite well. My words were quite harsh, and perhaps its because recent talk about you has reopened some old wounds. I apologize and I clearly went overboard.  That said, its water under the bridge. Its clear you had legitimate reasons for the split. I apologize for my recent 'tirades' against your site - they in retrospect are a bit unfair. I also apologize for the lies. While I'm sure they weren't taken very seriously, I threw around some words I shouldn't have and that were quite frankly lies and not fair.

Pongo will be polling interest in our users to see if this is still an option if your users are still interested as well. If it is, I have the power necessary to make it happen. Most of our moderation is against it, but if the administrators agree, Daniel agrees, and the users do it makes sense.

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Worried about the Chinese intercepting our extremely sensitive FES credentials, John?

Please keep it civil in the upper fora.

Thanks for the heads up. I'm aware of the problem, but it's not very important as we don't send anything particularly sensitive over HTTPS. The certificate expires in a few months anyway, so I'll just renew it then.
Sounds good! Yeah, its not very important.

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Suggestions & Concerns / Friendly reminder concerning your certificate
« on: April 20, 2016, 04:52:43 PM »
I was working on our certs today and thought I'd take a look at yours.

Your ssl cert is using an outdated algorithm. You should look at using SHA-2 instead. SHA-1 has been outdated since 2015.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Relative Flat Earth Theory - The Davis Model
« on: January 25, 2016, 09:15:21 AM »
Sorry the hair trigger on that. Thanks for all those who contacted me and posted here to let me know I was being silly.

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