[Martin Taylor 2014.04.01.10.52]
This is an unfortunate date to be suggesting new ideas, isn't it?
But this is a good old idea, and one I totally support. In fact,
such a forum exists at (Exploration of Complex
Adapting Control Systems), though it is rather moribund, the last
message on it having been posted at the end of July 2011. It was
started in February 2004. ECACS was started for two main reasons,
firstly because of the very limited half-life of discussion threads
on CSGnet, which meant that the wheel had to be reinvented many
times, and secondly because discussion of the complexity of
real-world perceptual control seemed to be crowded out on CSGnet in
favour of one-loop and two-level control systems acting in a
homogeneous environment.
Here is the current state of the ECACS site.
On the ECACS home page there are links to “Links” (to other
PCT-relevant sites), “Archival Documents”, “References”, and
“Forum”. All of these are now out of date, but could be updated as
users see fit. In the Forum, there are five main areas, built around
the metaphor of a virtual “Explorer’s Club”. The areas are:
“Who’s who and what’s what” for self-description by those embers
who want to make their interests and skills known
“Chart Room” for stable hypotheses and experimental results
“Pub and Grill” for “what’s cooking now” – ideas, speculations,
debatable issues and hypotheses, etc.
“Behind the Club” – stuff related to club management, policies,
polls and so forth
“Ye Ol’ Haunts” Intended for things that should be remembered but
are not of current interest. Actually used only for discussions of
the organization of the site.
There isn’t much in the “Chart Room” – Four posts on “Theory” and
eight on “references and Bibliographies”. There is, however, a
predefined topic area for “Software Repository” for links to and
descriptions of software relevant to complex PCT systems. Other
predefined topic areas with no content are Experiment and
Application, which also appear in the Pub and Grill.
The Pub and Grill had most of the action during the active life of
the Forum. It has seven major topic areas, entitled “Theory”, “Blue
Yonder”, “Roughneck Rooms”, “Application”, “Walkabouts”, “Mapping
and Charting”, and “Experiment”. On them there are, in total, 1270
posts, some of them quite extended dissertations. Most (765) are on
the Theory topic, which currently has 18 subtopics, the most active
of which are “What is PCT for?” (217 posts under 5 sub-subtopics)
and “Mathematical dynamics” (171 posts under 4 sub-subtopics). Other
realtively popular “Theory” subtopics were “Sociological Issues” (80
posts in 5 sub-subtopics) and “Emotions and affect” (88 posts in 2
subtopics).
The “Blue Yonder” topic has 11 subtopics, of which the most popular
were “Beliefs and attitudes” (45 posts), “PCT and the Persistence of
Belief” (38 posts), and “Development of monotheism” (21 posts). Blue
Yonder posts often have no obvious base in PCT, but deal with
observations that eventually should be subject either to denial of
the observation or explanation in a PCT analysis.
“Roughneck Rooms” are the place for personal comment, particularly
of the insulting kind. Posts in the other areas that seemed to
contain flames or flame-bait were arbitrarily moved there by the
moderators.Today scanning a few of the other old threads, I see
several that perhaps should have been moved here 
“Application” has three subtopics “Economics” with 8 sub-subtopics,
several of which have over 30 posts, “RTP” and “Organized Conflict”.
“Walkabouts” is for topics that have no obvious other home
“Mapping and Charting” is supposed to be an area for developing
“Maps and Charts” before putting the completed versions into the
Chart Room – sort of crowd-sourcing things that can later be used
for further development of PCT in complex environments. At the
moment, it is empty.
“Experiment” likewise has little content, other than a misplaced
thread that is partly about the use of real data in economics.
All these threads are still open for continued comment, unlike
e-mail threads, which tend to vanish into the mists of time within
weeks after the last message on them.
I guess that the forum software should be updated, but it still
seems to work. I posted a test message to it today, and received an
email message telling me (and I hope other ECACS members who had set
their profile to do that and who had not changed their addresses
since 2011) that the message had been posted.
The ECACS forum can be configured to allow users to choose to be
able to post by e-mail, but I haven’t checked whether it actually is
set up that way at the moment. And I don’t know whether the existing
ECACS forum could mass import all the messages from CSGnet, but it
would be a useful thing to do, especially if it could go back into
the archives. However, even if the Forum coud automatically import all the CSGnet
messages, I think it would require quite a bit of human curatorial
management in choosing the best place for the hundreds of different
threads that have accumulated over the years, many of which
recapitulate old threads under new names, and many of which split
into different threads under the same subject line. An especially
time-consuming bit of curation would be required to split off the
personal spats into the “Roughneck Rooms”. ECACS did try, not always
successfully, to ensure that the threads elsewhere in the forum were
conducted with a reasonable degree of courtesy (not a word much used
nowadays in respect of internet discussions). Furthermore, Dag
Forssell has an archive of CSGnet going back to who-knows-when, so
simply to import the messages would have no added value unless the
actual discussion topics were split and combined from the different
subject-line threads.
I just discovered that the discusware site seems to have gone out of
business, so the ECACS site software can’t be updated. Whatever I
tried today just worked, so it is functional. If anyone now wants to
post to the existing ECACS forum, they can do so, but first they
have to be registered as a member. That’s quite an easy thing to do,
but it requires a moderator’s approval, which is usually automatic,
at least for names known from CSGnet.
When I googled for “discusware” there were several hits describing
successful migration to other supporting software, including a not
too expensive commercial service to migrate it to phpBB. If there is
interest, I might try that.
Martin
···
On 2014/04/1 8:57 PM, Rupert Young
wrote:
This is very timely as I was considering posting amessage suggesting moving to a modern forum format.
I find the current format quite awkward to read with all theunformatted quoting. A forum format is much easier to read
especially when it comes to quoting. And we wouldn’t need to worry
about that pesky timestamp! Have a look at a forum I maintain on
www. Atheismuk.com
for an example.There are lots of fori around and we could add one to an existingwebsite. The Web host may actually provide one as an addon.
I wonder if we could find one that allows users to still post byemail and will import all the messages from csgnet?