CHANGES IN THE FORUM STRUCTURE

[Houdini]

Is there a way to change how the theads are displayed in a sub-forum? I would like to see the threads ordered with those having the most recent posts at the top. When I open a subforum now, it seems the threads are ordered randomly, with the top one having a recent comment that dates back months, and I have to go down 5-6 threads and find a thread with a comment from the previous day. I would like that thread to be displayed at the top.

[Observer]

search.php?search_id=active_topics :-)

[hoi.polloi]

Brief aside: we have been pretty liberal with our definition of "derailing" lately when all avenues of investigating evidence are yet to be explored. This is where the limitation of phpBB software comes into focus, where other forums have sub-threads in the nested sub-thread style. I personally find even the most "mixed" conversations here easily followable. Especially with the help of the "quote" function, you can follow (as inefficient as it is) the various trains of thought under a single heading.

Nevertheless, it is worth considering whether we have outlasted and/or outgrown this particular style of "modern" forum and if we might better accomplish our various interests in investigation through the installation of an old skool "threaded" forum, which allows for sub-discussions within each thread.

This can cause a slightly larger headache for moderation but it might be worth it? I think most people are used to the linear form rather than tree branch form now.

[Observer]

Just to clarify what Houdini was mentioning 3 posts back:

In the old RealityShack version, there were threads within each sub-forum that were "pinned" (also called "stickied") so that they would always remain at the top, and the fact that they were "pinned" was clearly labelled, so no readers there were confused about why threads with recent posts were appearing BELOW pinned-threads without recent posts.

In the current CluesForum version, there are threads within each sub-forum that are "pinned" so that they always remain at the top, BUT the fact that they are "pinned" is NOT labelled (we can call this non-marked phenomenon "secretly-pinned" or "ninja-pinned", haha), so some readers (like Houdini, and myself at first) got kinda' confused about why threads with recent posts appear below those (secretly-pinned) threads without recent posts. So a simple fix to that problem is simply go in and label those pinned threads as being pinned threads.

As I mentioned to Houdini above, a nice work-around, for those of us who want to read everything (EVERYTHING, haha) in perfect chronological order is to simply click the "View Active Topics" button, which gives a perfectly chronological list of ALL the posts ever made, sorted from most recent to first ever.

I sure do wish, since we're talking about wishes here, that there was a button that produced lovely results like the "View Active Topics" button, but with just one slight change:

This new "View Active Topics, in Full Post Style" when pressed would produce the following results: same as "View Active Topics" but showing the Full Posts.

Currently, I click View Active Topics, and then right click to "open in a new tab", one by one, the top 5 or 6 or 7 threads that appear at the top, and I'll bet most users here do the same.

This "View Active Topics, in Full Post Style" idea would take away that whole "open 7 threads in new tabs" action, and would instead simple show a long scroll of all the most recent posts, with the absolute newest posts at the top, and this long scrolling list of posts would SHOW the full posts, regardless of what divisional thread name each post derives from.

Am I saying this in a confusing way? I simply wanna add a database search which says "Show all the posts, from newest to oldest, regardless of what section the posts were posted in, and when I say show all the posts I mean the full posts, not just the first few lines."

The result would be one could click this "View Active Topics, in Full Post Style" button, et voila, I'm instantly looking at one page (one long scrolling page) which contains all of the posts, so that I only need to scroll up and down that one page.

You've already got a similar database search option, known as Search User's Posts. But that only shows the posts of one user, and only the first few lines of each post. So, this new idea is to be just like the "Search User's Posts" button, except the results show ALL users' posts, showing ALL the lines of each post, even the photos and videos. ONE button click produces ONE long scrolling page to see it all! :-)

Now, separate from my request about that new button, I would like to comment on your most recent idea Hoi, about changing up the style itself:

I think perhaps you mean basically "nevermind all these 'thread divisions' and basically have one long scrolling thread, even though that's old school, because each person when posting can begin their post with "RE: the blah-blah-blah subject" or "RE: post #123" or whatever, if the poster wants to make it clear which particular subject, or which particular poster, this new post is replying to.

So this ONE-THREAD idea (which I think you were getting at Hoi, but I could be wrong, please do correct me if I incorrectly paraphrased your post above) is something that I would like to see, because I really do just want to see the CluesForum community conversation without clicking open a bunch of different threads.

But, since I fear that some people would prefer to have the thread divisions in place (as they are now), I would like to once again suggest the "View Active Topics in Full Post Form" button being created, so that no one could complain. The folks who like the thread divisions, based on subject, can continue to use this current system the way it exists now, and the folks who don't care about subject divisions and just wanna see the conversation in order, live-feed-style, can click the optional new "View Active Topics, in Full Post Style" magic button.

Just an idea. But don't worry, I (like everyone else here) am totally happy and satisfied with this forum, no matter what layout or buttons, because this forum is the only place in the world where people have the courage to say, "This image/video of a supposed event was forged, and even the supposedly living humans depicted within these forged images/videos are in fact themselves FORGED, FABRICATED, COMPUTER GRAPHIC surprisingly-realistic-looking-but-still-non-perfect 3D Avatars, which mask the identities of the script-writers perpetrating these frauds on humanity.

[hoi.polloi]

We have been looking for a way to implement some better organization around here. Perhaps this is the key to doing it.

To be clear, Observer, what I am talking about with "threaded" forums is the style you can see in non-linear boards like Democratic Underground (http://www.democraticunderground.com/index.php) or Reddit (reddit.com) where you can hit "reply to [specific] post" rather than replying to an entire thread. This creates a tree-like nest of posts ostensibly related to each other. The downside is that it could create double-posts and it becomes more difficult to reference posts within a topic. It is slightly more "chat" style, traditionally, and DU solved it by having each area be self-moderated to an extent. This still resulted in an unfortunate domination of forensics topics like CluesForum's by ad hominem attacks and unscientific arguments, but the point is there is a durable model for organizing information in this way, that we could copy. It is considered an "older" form of forum. Most people are familiar with our present style, which is linear, and where quotes are the driving tree system that connects intra-thread topics. I am not sure it would work here. Probably not. Just a thought!

But increasing the number of ways to organize posts besides the "search" function or other default queries is a good idea.

I should tell you, though, that the "sticky" topics have their own subtle icons. I can enhance the difference manually by changing the graphics if you'd like, and you think it would help those stand out. I admit phpBB's default icons are not the clearest.

I will also look into implementing what you have requested, Observer: a single "latest posts" blog-roll style page with the complete posts rather than a preview of the posts as they appear in the search results window. It sounds to me like it could actually be pretty simple.

Perhaps there could also be something brianv suggested, which would be a better way to immediately sort the academic stuff from speculations and musings. This could be something like the following:

• a voting system in the "poster information" sidebar of each post whereby members can elect to have a convincing proof "elevated" with +1 votes
  
• Simon and other mods browsing the highest voted posts and manually flagging ones they see as "proof" such as the "hat's off glitch" or "nose out" fuck ups
  
• a button or link at the top that allows people to search or view a sorted page comprised of just these particular "glitches in the matrix" while avoiding the speculative posts.

I think this would replace the need for a Wiki because you could just concentrate on the big bankster hoaxes (Nukes, Space, Terrorism, War) if you wanted to.

Would people be in support of or against this kind of system, or something close to it, if we could figure it out?

[Critical Mass]

We have been looking for a way to implement some better organization around here. Perhaps this is the key to doing it.

My thoughts based upon my relatively short time here.


I'd agree that there needs to be some better structuring... especially for new people to the forum.

Undebunkable clues are mixed in with discussions, 'Work-in-progress' & musings.

Heck does the forum even have something as simple as a 'mission statement'?

I'd imagine you need an 'Undebunkable clues' page in each sub-forum and a new sub-forum titled 'For new readers' (or something like that) which links to all those 'Undebunkable clues' pages as well as providing some basic tips, reading, viewing suggestions etc.

A up-voting system could be implemented... but the admins would actually decide what goes into an 'Undebunkable clues' page. Perhaps with some basic counter balancing checks in place (i.e. Hoi could not put his own posts into an 'Undebunkable Clues' page).


I'd also, perhaps controversially, recommend an 'open' sub-forum where 'debunkers' can post... I've seen such things on WN boards. An 'Anti' can join a place like Stormfront & post in the 'opposing views' section & nowhere else.

I joked about it recently but I really would like someone like Alex Wellerstein to be able to post here & try to explain to us 'ignorant anti-Semites' why 'nuclear bomb light' doesn't cast shadows. 'Opposing members' (We'd need a better term... 'coincidence theorists'?) could always be banned if they get too 'intellectual' like Sophia 'F*** your egalitarianism' Perennis.

Besides it would actually give the moderators additional options... if someone starts posting bullshite you could demote them to the open forum rather than just fully ban them. Additionally if someone disagrees with a topic then their posts can be just sent to the open forum (Perhaps that would have been a better way to handle the 'Airplane Joe' situation?).

Alternatively perhaps each sub-forum could have its own chatbox thread... & users themselves keep their discussions & musings in these chatboxes?

[Observer]

About voting: allowing users to vote, like at Reddit, seems great in theory. One User, One vote. Democracy. Yay. But there is a big minus about this voting thing in reality. I'll explain the big minus in my final paragraph at the bottom of this post (feel free to skip down to that.)

In the Reddit style, the default setting is: theoretically, the up-voted posts appear at the top (due to being intelligent, well-written, surprising, or just plain humorous) and the down-voted posts appear at the bottom where most people don't scroll down to.

(Uh, well, actually, that default Reddit style still doesn't display in perfect "voted-ranking-order", because of the fact that people are allowed to simply tack on their comment directly under the top voted comment. Meaning, instead of replying to the thread itself, some users sneakily reply to the highest ranked comment, or to the comment directly under that. So even in this supposed "voted-ranking-order" style one still can not scroll down perfectly from highest ranked comment to lowest ranked comment. One ends up scrolling down from highest ranked, to some jerk who just posted some crap directly under the highest ranked comment, then comes the second ranked comment, then the third, then oops some other jerk replied to the third highest ranked comment, so in the end when you scroll from top to bottom you still see various low ranked comments popping up here and there even in the middle and even near the top.

Now, to solve that problem, of seeing all those crappy down-voted posts when you only want to see the cream of the cream, users can choose in their settings area, "Whenever I browse a thread, show me only the posts that have a positive score" or you can limit it even further by saying "Whenever I browse a thread, show me only the posts that have a positive score above 50 (or 100, or 300, or whatever)" Those settings are all up to each user to decide for himself or herself.

Another option, shown at the top of each thread, is sorting by chronological order. Meaning, "Nevermind ranking, show oldest to newest, or, newest to oldest", but again, just like explained above, because people are able to attach their comment to any comment, well, it turns out that even when you select the "sort chronologically" option you STILL don't get to see all of the comments sorted chronologically. You see a kinda' chronological pattern, but a lot of non-chronological posts attached under posts, so chronological lovers like me are disappointed.

Another option is "Show me the controversial posts at top, the posts which received about 50 up-votes and about 50 down-votes, so even though the total score has balanced out to about zero, I still would prefer to read the controversial comments first, before reading the non-controversial comments." But again, because of the "comment anywhere" ability mentioned above, you STILL don't really get the perfect sorting results.

And let's not forget the lemming effect. Where people, either consciously or unconsciously, start upvoting a post/thread just because the post/thread started to be upvoted by others. People walk in to the party, and since upvoting has already begun, your experience begins by seeing those popular posts/threads floating at the top, and so those are the posts/threads you are most likely to upvote yourself, because #1 all of these other users in this lovely community can't be wrong, and #2 who wants to sift through the down-voted losers at the bottom, there must be something wrong with them, so I'll just look at these top 20 posts and upvote a few within them. Hmmm, so whoever gets in there early and gets the ball rolling in one direction or another has a good chance of creating momentum towards an "early consensus" which then leads the lemming-like monkey-see monkey-do aspect of humanity to simply copy the early consensus which leads to a "strong consensus" that once strengthened becomes very hard for any of the non-copying relatively-independent-thinking voters to fix.

But here I want to end my complaints about the Reddit voting system with the biggest complaint, which is a very dangerous minus, in my opinion. The voting. The voting allows TPTB to use a combination of shills and bots to totally skewer the results. It's like Diebold voting software, brought to the online community. Democracy becomes a total illusion. Yep, voting bot technology exists and is being used. The bot tech is simple, "I'm a shill, I've been paid to downvote this kind of post, so now that I've marked this post with this special software as being a 'make this post disappear' kind of post, now all I have to do is click this one button and my thousands of usernames will log in, one by one, in an apparently random fashion, nothing obvious at all, just various username logging in reading articles and voting, right, and so my bots downvote to obscurity this truthful post/thread, and concurrently upvote to the top the fraudulent posts/or threads, to really make those truthful posts/threads disappear down to the depths where most people won't ever see. Goodbye truth. Hello mainstream bullshit and red herrings and time wasting posts. This creates a reality in which the highest voted threads and the highest voted comments within each thread, are NOT determined by the regular people doing the "one user, one vote" thing, to the contrary, the highest ranked stuff at Reddit turns out to be the stuff which TPTB want the masses to see, and the lowest ranked stuff (that most people thus never notice) turns out to be the stuff which TPTB don't want the masses to see. What's the solution to all of these shills and bots overpowering with mountains of upvotes and downvotes the actual will of the readers? Shall we enforce a new rule, "From now on let's limit one vote to one IP address. Yeah, that'll limit the bad guys from skewing the results with their hundreds of thousands of username robots. One IP address, one vote. Yeah!" Nope, because here is the second problem, TPTB, in addition to having the money for hundreds of shills each controlling thousands of usernames connected to bot technology, also have the resources to buy millions of IP addresses. So TPTB will always be stuffing the online ballot boxes, with extreme amounts of usernames and extreme amounts of IP addresses. Now, one might say, "Well here at Clues Forum, because we have wisely limited, and will continue to wisely limit, the number of users by requiring a good-sounding introduction letter, we won't have this problem." I think the painful answer is, "Nah, that extra step hasn't prevented a bunch of shill accounts to have been created here, there are probably many many many quiet non-posting members with usernames, perhaps even 30 or 40 or 50%, who got in just like everyone else with a a mere letter, and this collection of quiet waiters would love to suddenly have this voting ability to push truthful posts down and fraudulent posts up. And in addition to the bad users sitting and waiting, there will of course come more. So, I think in the end the voting thing will lead to people complaining (as people do in the "conspiracy" section of Reddit) and leaving (as they recently have done, myself included), because we rational observers have noticed that the voting system is being skewed by usernames controlled by bots which are controlled by shills. So, bottom line, I prefer the idea of continuing to entrust the pin-ing/sticky-ing, moving, and deleting, to our one benevolent dictator, our beloved leader (ha ha, don't worry I'm not being sarcastic) whom all of us real readers obviously trust already, Simon - and whomever Simon has decided has already proven themselves over the many many years (Hoi, Brian, Nonho, Matt, and whoever has proven themselves over the years to be trusted by these long-standing admins/mods.) It sure is weird that I'm suggesting continued benevolent dictatorship forever, but I have seen the voting fraud in physical elections, and I have seen the voting fraud in online Reddit, so I am scared that voting in general no longer works when the bad guys control voting fraud technology.

[I'm still trying to figure out how voting can ever work in general. On one hand, we know that humanity must re-install the system of PURE democracy, because electing leaders means a republic, which of course means dictators refusing to make laws which the people want, due to bribes and threats from TPTB. We should only be voting for LAWS in a pure democracy, like in the Golden days of Greece, except without that unfair "White Male Land-Owning Voters Only" clause, of course. But again, how can we ever have voting if TPTB have the modern technology and the resources to stuff the ballot boxes? It's bad enough that they stuff real voters' minds with fake images, thus causing people to vote the wrong way, but now these top resource controllers are stuffing the ballot boxes with fake votes (like what happened in Ireland recently, and everywhere really. Anyway, just my opinion, I think that voting, currently (without some genius new idea to connect one physical body with one physical vote) is flawed due to the current technology imbalance and resource imbalance.]

Readers here trust Simon. That's why we're here. We've been burnt by other communities, with their claims of real victims and real actors and real images, we have never been burnt by Simon. I like the vibe of this guy living in Italy, whom I have written to and spoken with. I don't know WHO in the hell is actually controlling the majority of the 1400 quiet usernames, nor WHO in the hell will actually be controlling the new usernames who will sneak in after voting begins. I guess the real bottom line is this, feel free to introduce voting, which will then determine ranking, if you trust all the users then perhaps the voting results will be fine. I'll just continue to read every post chronologically, and mentally vote in my own mind about each post and about each poster. Final sentence: I DO like Hoi's idea of Simon (and his trusted few) marking the "MOST OBVIOUS, LEAST DEBATABLE, INSTANCES OF MEDIA IMAGE FORGERIES", so that readers can have the option of seeing (and showing to their family and friends) a big long purified collection of the cream of the cream - and yet the SeptemberClues.info site is basically that already, it simply needs the more recent CluesForum.info cream to be selected, marked, and added to the SeptemberClues.info cream ... and I think that job should be done by Simon (and his already trusted crew.) :-)

*PS - Simon, for the "I trust Simon more than I trust any of these other members, electronic voting is dangerous, long live this benevolent dictatorship" speech above, you can kindly send the secret $10,000 payment check to my home address, which, as a supposedly paid shill of The U.N./Wescam/Kissinger trifecta, you undoubtedly "already know." ;-) Haha

[fbenario]

I like the forum's current structure, and desire no changes at all. Especially no voting on posts.

It would be nice to figure out a way to force new members to follow our basic posting requirements.

[brianv]

I like the forum's current structure, and desire no changes at all. Especially no voting on posts.

It would be nice to figure out a way to force new members to follow our basic posting requirements.

I'd vote this post up if I could

[anonjedi2]

I like the forum the way it is and wouldn't change much, especially not the colors / style.

At the end of the day, it is up to each individual to come spend the necessary time (months, years) to read all of the information on this website and "catch up". That's what I did, and it takes a long time. I usually watch September Clues once a year (on 9/11) just as a refresher. I have read the VicSim report 3 times now and still don't fully grasp all of it. Ultimately, it takes time and diligence to go through all of these massive threads.

Sometimes it's hard to find information via search, so maybe there's some opportunity to create an evidence bag of sorts for each individual topic of research. Within that evidence bag can be a few pockets to hold specific items (articles, videos, photographs, etc).

I would also suggest a separate section on the forum for the research and evidence pertaining to the concept of controlled opposition, gatekeeping, shillery, etc. I strongly believe that understanding this critical piece of the puzzle is imperative. Speaking personally, I believe my overall understanding of the big picture came much more into focus when I learned about this piece. It would be great to have somewhere to go for a full education on just this part of the research, so that you can send someone to a thread (or section) and say:

"Read everything in this section of the website to understand this concept."

[pov603]

I like the forum's current structure, and desire no changes at all. Especially no voting on posts.

It would be nice to figure out a way to force new members to follow our basic posting requirements.

I'd vote this post up if I could

Ditto

[HonestlyNow]

*
The current structure is perfect (for me), and that also includes the colors and styles. Please, don't add voting, or likes.

What I would like to see changed, possibly as an option in board preferences, is to have any links that are within posts to open in a new tab.

[fbenario]

have any links that are within posts to open in a new tab.

Just right-click on the link and choose 'open link in new tab'.

[HonestlyNow]

have any links that are within posts to open in a new tab.

Just right-click on the link and choose 'open link in new tab'.

That's what I do. Or else Control and click, or Shift-Control-Click. But, just looking to make it easier instead of having to remember to always do that. Other sites and forums go to another tab, which is nicely convenient.

[Observer]

Just right-click on the link and choose 'open link in new tab'.

Or else Control and click, or Shift-Control-Click.

A 3rd workaround is to "middle-click" it (using the mouse's wheel.)