On behalf of Max Tegmark and Anthony Aguirre, FQXi Directorate ---
As we start the new year of 2013, we at FQXi have been looking over the past year and evaluating our plans for the future. As part of that review, we'd like to take a moment here on the forums to discuss some important institutional issues with our readers. In this post, we would like to go over our plans for maintaining the high level of helpful, useful and interesting discussion in our forums. (By forums, we include the discussions and comments attached to every blog post, article, and essay on our site.)
The FQXi forums have evolved and grown a great deal since the website launched, especially so in the past couple of years, thanks in part to our essay contests. With the growing community of users comes a need to reaffirm the purpose of the forums, and the behavior we expect from users. In brief, we provide online forums for scientific and educational purposes. Participants should always keep these purposes in mind.
We have updated our Terms of Use, which every user should read before posting anything. In order to maintain an appropriate level of civility, we have strengthened the Terms of Use and its Appropriate Content Rules by lowering the bar as to what constitutes unacceptable behavior. We ask you, the community, to help us by flagging posts that violate this code of conduct; we will also try to be more diligent in our own monitoring and removal of such posts.
In addition, we will soon require that you be logged in to post comments. No 'anonymous' commenting will be allowed. Particularly egregious violations of the forum rules may result in loss of posting privileges, or loss of 'posting-as-member' privileges if applicable.
We want to emphasize that our concern here is not the scientific content of posts, but the form and tone of users' comments. We do not want to hamper productive discussions, even of controversial (scientific) topics. We simply ask that all users conduct these discussions in civil, courteous, and constructive ways.
And now, we look forward to the discussions.