I hope that Fraser and/or whoever else is responsible for deciding on the name change is at least aware of this thread and how unpopular the name name is with the regulars here, and hopefully are actually following the thread.
Established Member
I hope that Fraser and/or whoever else is responsible for deciding on the name change is at least aware of this thread and how unpopular the name name is with the regulars here, and hopefully are actually following the thread.
Order of Kilopi
Can't there be a BAUT 1/4 page button on the cosmoquest entrance page where we find good ol' BAUT' , cheerfully
existing and moderating as we like and enjoy ( keeps us well and social) . So we have both. We're more than an anex,
more than a sub menu. We are a world.
For myself, Baut is the way to go.
Established Member
Well, I suppose since CosmoQuest is BIG (per antoniseb's post, I am among those living in a box who didn't know it existed prior to this thread) then what they say goes anyhow. And I do suppose they will want to have a CosmoQuest forum, not some weird thing like Universe Today...Originally Posted by Grashtel
The name is really pretty unimportant, as is the structure, the policies, the moderators and whatarewetohave at this stage. I've been to a lots of forums that ended or became other forums or moved to another place. If I don't like it over in the new joint forum, I can find other places to go to.
The dog, the dog, he's at it again!
Established Member
My small experience of large organisations is that, eventually, they prefer their interactions to follow the blog-with-comments model rather than the forum model.
Established Member
That is also entirely possible. The Richard Dawkins Foundation axed their actual forum for example.
The dog, the dog, he's at it again!
Order of Kilopi
I agree with all of that.
The "quest" part of "Cosmoquest" is its main problem,
but the fact that "Cosmos" is truncated to "Cosmo" is a
problem, too. "Universe" and "Cosmos" are equally okay
to me as part of a new name.
-- Jeff, in Minneapolis
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/
"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"
"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves
Order of Kilopi
This is cosmo.
(Great show, for a while).
Get up, a get-get, get down.
Administrator
ToSeeked on post 81.
Forming opinions as we speak
Order of Kilopi
So no chance of sneaking Neverfly in I guess.
Administrator
Actually, IF he's been over at CosmoQuest peacefully doing GalaxyZoo or Moon-mapping, or something like that and is a calm established member there, he *probably* would be given an exception. Aside from that, no.
Forming opinions as we speak
Order of Kilopi
Among other things, at CosmoQuest, registered users can join Ice Investigators, the successor (in some sense) to the Zooinverse's Ice Hunters (which, as antoniseb pointed out, found a goodly number of potential New Horizons targets, for when it's done with Pluto); Moon Mappers, which is somewhat complementary to the Zooinverse's Moon Zoo; Citizen Science Wiki (brand new?); will be running courses, as part of CosmoAcademy (in addition to Star Parties, Hangouts, etc); and so on.
So it would seem that the forum there is a pretty minor part, and much of the forum involves discussion concerning Moon Mappers and Ice Investigators.
While it is not, as one poster may have implied, part of the Zooinverse (and certainly Galaxy Zoo is not part of CosmoQuest), there is no doubt that many questers (?) are also zooites (both those focussed on Galaxy Zoo and those involved in other projects).
Discussion of banned users brings up an interesting question: what if a banned BAUTian is also a very active Moon Mapper? Will such a person be forever banned from doing citizen science in CosmoQuest? Or perhaps the registration (etc) for the forum will be separate from that of the 'doing science' parts (as I think happens with at least Galaxy Zoo)?
ETA: my post overlapped with antoniseb's
Last edited by Nereid; 2012-Jun-29 at 12:50 PM. Reason: ETA
Administrator
That post is fairly odd.
Order of Kilopi
I am from the BA site, so I will be sad to see the "Bad Astronomy" title disappear. I can't really fault the logic though. I kind of prefer New Universe Today at the moment... but the poll idea with more choices is great.
On an aside, I am already on the Cosmoquest.org forums under this user name. Will my account be condensed or will I have to pick a new name?
Solfe
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'That was tops! Who's not good at math? I was all, "Four!"' - Finn, Adventure Time.
Order of Kilopi
Sorry, I just thought of something else which is too much to roll into an edit.
I love that Banner Logo Selenite posted.
Is there any chance that BAUT/Cosmoquest would consider a mini-logo for bloggers and news agency? Nothing spice up a blog post/news story like an image.
I understand that this is more than whipping up a logo, there may have to be a TOS linked to the logo to prevent woo-woo/hatchet job crud from being associated with it.
Just a thought.
Solfe
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'That was tops! Who's not good at math? I was all, "Four!"' - Finn, Adventure Time.
Administrator
One of the time-consuming things that will make the merger take all day is the sorting out of people. We have a few possible cases to handle.
Same person-Same name: Should be no problem, unless your profile email addresses make you look like different people.
Different people-Same name: Hopefully we don't have any of these, but one of them will get something added to the end of their name, like -CQ or -UT (we haven't worked that out exactly yet)
Same person-Different name: We'll ask you to pick one. In some rare cases, where privacy concerns are in play, an individual might be able to ask to keep both for an interim period, be we aren't resolved about how that might work yet with the BAUT Sock-puppet rules etc.
Different people-Different name: This was never a problem.
Forming opinions as we speak
Order of Kilopi
Oh, nevermind. I messed up my "subscriptions" over at cosmoquest.org and didn't see that the mod team already answered me there.
They have logos already:
http://cosmoquest.org/Logos_and_Graphical_Elements
Solfe
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'That was tops! Who's not good at math? I was all, "Four!"' - Finn, Adventure Time.
Order of Kilopi
I, too, never heard of Cosmoquest before today.
It isn't obvious that there would be an advantage to
either organization of a merger. Who thinks it would
be a good idea, and why? Generally what happens in
a merger is that one organization dies and the other
has to pay for it. Not always, of course, but more
often than not the merged organization ends up
smaller than the larger of the two before merger.
-- Jeff, in Minneapolis
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/
"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"
"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves
Moderator
It's Fraser's board, he gets to do what he wants. I suppose he is looking at the costs of running two different setups.
Rules For Posting To This Board
All Moderation in Purple
Established Member
I assume that the moderators just happen to know that there's no-one on the Cosmoquest boards, or with the expectation of joining them from participation in CQ activities, who has been banned eternally by BAUT.
Administrator
The moderators here know no such thing. I've had a conversation with the owner of CQX and we have a plan to deal with such cases if there are any. We suspect that there aren't any, but until we investigate, we don't know for sure.
Forming opinions as we speak
Established Member
Good luck. I can imagine no proper or satisfactory resolution of such a problem.
Administrator
Sorry I took so long to give you the official position, but here it is...
As you know, Phil and I were running separate boards years ago. I had a well oiled moderation team while Phil was managing it all on his own, and getting totally burned out. So I suggested we just merge our overlapping communities. Suspicions ran high, but as you can see years later, it worked out pretty well. It's a great community, with great people and great rules. It's open enough to be welcoming and active, but with enough rules to keep it as a place worth visiting.
This is entirely because of the hard work of antoniseb, Toseek, and the rest of the moderation team and community. Apart from the fact that Phil and I pay the bills for the server, we don't actually own the community.
But right from the earliest days of starting Universe Today, it has been my dream to communicate my love of space and astronomy with the public. It's what set up my partnership with Phil, and introduced me to Pamela. That's why we've been doing Astronomy Cast for years now.
Pamela and I share the dream of pushing citizen science to the next level, and actually give the public the tools to participate in research projects, and so we launched Cosmoquest about a year ago. You can go on that site, identify lunar features, find Kuiper Belt Objects, and have your discoveries integrated into actual research papers. We want to give the general public a way to participate in astronomy without having to get a PhD first.
As part of the toolset, Cosmoquest needed a community, so we installed a vBulletin board and got working to create that community around the tools we provide to researchers and the public. But I realized a couple of days ago, we're just duplicating our efforts. We already have an amazing community, focused on astronomy outreach and debunking junk science.
Furthermore, Cosmoquest already has a budget and admin team that actively manage servers and databases. So instead of keeping the forum going with my spare time and couch pocket change, we could put some serious resources behind it.
Finally, Cosmoquest is where I'm focusing my energy. But if we integrate BAUT with that project, it'll be a lot closer to what I'm working on, so you'll probably see more of me - and a LOT more of Pamela who's a social butterfly.
BAUT is the 500 pound gorilla here, and very little would change. Cosmoquest would become a subsection of the site, and might provide a moderator or two, but essentially everything in the forum would remain exactly the same.
Of course, if you did want to help out with some of these citizen science projects, you'll already have an account in the new forum. Plus you'll get notifications of the various star parties and hangouts we're doing.
Too long, didn't read?
Moving BAUT to Cosmoquest will cause the following:
- same ownership. Cosmoquest is run by me, Pamela and Phil
- new dedicated server
- new dedicated server administrators
- actual budget for hardware and software
- same admin team (antoniseb, Toseek)
- same moderation team (maybe a few additional people specifically helping with the Cosmoquest section)
- more resources for spam hunting
- more involvement from the owners... I hope.
- access to cool research projects like Ice Investigators and Moon Mappers
- new logo
- not your favorite name... :-(
- a day of downtime, and then the familiar bug hunt as we stabilize the new forum
Oh, and have you seen this yet?
Order of Kilopi
O_O
I have a new favorite online teaching resource. (Okay, it's tied with UNebraska's stuff, but they have a lot of stuff.) I'm hoping these are streamed on youtube, like I saw the BA do with the Venus transit party.
Pardon the interruption. You all can go back to complaining about the name now.
Order of Kilopi
Neverfly even managed to get himself banned from Toms forum (spacetimeandtheuniverse) so I find it unlikely he'd be a non-banned member of cosmoquest.
(However, a banned BAUTian could possibly go now to cosmoquest and join, so they could be a member of the combined forum after the merger. In the end, such a person would either be a "reformed" member and stay, or end up getting kicked out again.)
Get up, a get-get, get down.
Senior Member
Yeah...good luck getting Phil to post to his own board.
As long as you've considered our feelings in this name matter...as I can tell you have....sheesh.- not your favorite name... :-(
Established Member
If you don't choose a name I like, I will withhold my dues!
(what's that...uh huh...really?...okay)
Um, nevermind
I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. - Jimmy Hoffa
Administrator
Obviously I have. But it's the one thing I have no control over.
Established Member
What's in a name anyway, eh ?
I really hope some of the technical/management issues gain some resolution .. (as this seems to be one of the motivating reasons for the merger).
A good call .. IMHO.
Cheers
Senior Member
If the board owner has no "control" over the name of the board, then who does??
Administrator
Churchy La Femme ... or more precisely the big mover on the whole operation. It's her name, and we're riding with her.
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