Link.
The whole article is way too long to post here, but basically what happened was this:Death of the Dawkins forum – The world’s busiest atheist forum closes
<snip>
- Richard Dawkins didn't run his site personally, being non-net savvy. Instead, he hired a guy called Josh Timonen to be his Tech administrator.
- The moderation staff was not paid, they were voluntary workers.
- The Tech admin staff and Dawkins were not involved with the running of the forum.
- The forum got about ten times larger than the front page.
- For a long time, the forum had severe server issues and the Tech staff had failed to provide feedback from the complaints, much less solutions.
- Eventually, the Tech staff says they are going to design a re-vamped site, which would supposedly solve these issues. The moderators are nervous, but get promises that they will be kept in the loop and will be listened to.
- The Tech staff announces that they are about to launch the new site, and sorry, there won't be a forum there, but a glorified comment section, with "tags".
- The moderators and users get different accounts of what was going on, and initially, the wrath of the users was in part directed at the moderators. Then, one of the moderators shares the message they received with the general users, and the forum promptly gets shut down.
- Several longstanding members, including aforementioned moderator have their accounts deleted, and the complaints thread gets deleted also.
- Signatures with advertisements for other forums where people could go instead get deleted.
- Richard Dawkins himself weighs in, angrily berating the community for the attacks made against the Tech staff during these events, apparently not knowing that the quotes he used were from another forum all together, and only posted AFTER the forum had been shut down.
Here's the followup article: link
The situation has made its way into Times Online. The same deceptions were being repeated by the Tech staff, apparently, but the user comments there tell a different story.
