Posts by Apognophos

7

Conspiracy Theorist groups similar to the Watchtower

by enigma1863 in

i was watching a you tube video on charlie veitch and i could not help but see the parallels with his experience with truthers and the ex jw experience with the watchtower.

what do you think?:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uyzitc_90.

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Apognophos

At 6:00 in the second part of the interview, he talks about how members of the movement had to attack his credibility when he left the movement, because for them it's a kind of religion, so they couldn't just let him go and say, "Well, he disagrees with us".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2TjLuguKXs

180

Please post new forum feedback or questions here

by Simon in

well, the switchover happened - there were a couple of things i had to fix which meant the posting was disabled for longer than i planned but it's now enabled and some people have already posted.. if you have any questions about the new format or suggestions on how to improve it, please post them here.. if you are having trouble signing in or posting then you'll need to email me instead.. many thanks to everyone for their patience during the changeover !.

Apognophos

A few new issues:

- when copying the text of a PM, the line breaks or paragraph breaks all vanish and the text gets pasted in as a monolithic block

- in PMs and forum posts, instead of just the user avatar's square area being clickable, the clickable area continues invisibly running down the page underneath that icon; mousing over that white space will show the same link as when pointing to the avatar itself

- the colon-hyphen-slash sequence in URLs seems to be turning into an emoticon now -- see below

Just a review of past issues that are still open:

- the unread PM inbox counts are still off; unfortunately a number of users are seeing that message to download an app to read their messages, which, combined with the wrong unread PM count, may be causing people to download malware (they should be more computer-savvy, of course, but well, you know)

- the text "Discuss anything Jehovah Witness, JW.org or WatchTower society related" has the issues I mentioned here, most notably the missing "'s": http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/12020001/please-post-new-forum-feedback-questions-here?page=10

- when viewing your own profile, it gives the correct post count across all threads you've participated in, but gives only your own created thread count, e.g. "4,264 posts in 43 topics" -- I've created 43 topics but I've posted on hundreds, which don't seem to be viewable

- the quote-style button cannot turn off the quote style for selected text, at least in Firefox on a Mac

I know you have a lot on your plate, so this isn't meant as a nag. I'm just an obsessive organizer and I like to report bugs :-)

8

This New Site

by smiddy in

i was a bit bamboozled at first , and now slowly getting the hang of it , the new tools we can use to navigate through it.. change is always hard for us old farts .. smiddy.

Apognophos

No, do not download any apps, a lot of people are seeing that message, but it's not from the site. The envelope number is wrong for many of us, and Simon keeps saying he'll fix it.

7

Conspiracy Theorist groups similar to the Watchtower

by enigma1863 in

i was watching a you tube video on charlie veitch and i could not help but see the parallels with his experience with truthers and the ex jw experience with the watchtower.

what do you think?:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uyzitc_90.

.

Apognophos

Thanks, this is interesting. At 15:00 he is talking about how he really thought that he was supposed to be following wherever the evidence led him, but when he changed sides, everyone from the conspiracy side hated him and thought he'd been "compromised" by the powers that be. Then he says the 9/11 conspiracists calling themselves a "truth movement" is as much of a joke as a religion calling itself a truth movement.

I think that some of us genuinely felt that being "in the truth" meant that we would always follow the evidence to make sure it was the truth. And for a while, the best information we had seen indicated that JWs had the truth. But when we learned evidence that contradicted the "truth" and adjusted our views, we were surprised to find that other JWs did not understand what we were doing, or want to listen to us.

I specifically know one JW elder who has indicated that he thinks reading certain material would cause him to "fall out of the truth", so he deliberately doesn't read it. Now, I like him -- he's a kind man, and very smart -- but what can I say in the face of brazen intellectual dishonesty like that? These just aren't people I can associate myself with anymore.

36

Site issues: Dec 27 Update

by Simon in

here's the current status:.

performance improvements have been made to make things slicker.. the "remember me" issue should now be fixed.. sign-in captcha can be affected by ad-blockers so consider disabling those.. sign-in email is case-sensitive - until i update this consider using your forum username instead.. ie stalls on "queued for processing" when posting a topic or reply but the post has been made (just navigate to active or refresh the topic if replying).. i will be working through issues today and contacting anyone who had sign-in issues to check if they still have problems.. many thanks again for your patience while we work through these teething problems..

Apognophos

I can probably make the timeago include a mouseover with the specific date/time.

Yes, I'd like to see this too. I've already tried mousing over that text to see if the date pops up :-) That being said, I'm not convinced that "five years ago" is more helpful than just saying "2009/11/29", especially because I find the date-rounding code on this site to be counter-intuitive (seems that it will say "four years ago" up to 4 years, 364 days in the past, before it flips over to "five" the next day, and minutes seem to get rounded to "an hour" at the 45 minute mark).

7

Forum shuns me!

by stillin in

the forum has signed me off twice.

glad i got the sign in thing worked out!

also, my pm alert says there is mail for me but there isn't.. simon, are you down under?

Apognophos

There is an official thread for reporting issues. In it, I brought up the negative unread PM counts and Simon said he will run a script to fix the problem. Don't bother trying to read/send PMs to fix it unless he says otherwise.

22

Christmas Beliefs!

by J-DUBBED in

do jehova wingnuts believe jesus birthday isn't dec 25?

or do they just plain and simple not believe in any birthday?.

Apognophos

Yeah, wow, that's news to me too.

7

JW Doctor mis-Illustrates a Blood Doctrine

by Marvin Shilmer in

jw
friends

today i added a new article to my blog addressing an article written by a jw medical doctor in a regional medical journal.

it's part of an initiative giving attention to how licensed medical professionals among jws have dealt with the blood transfusion subject.

what they say, how they say it, and what they don't say are all very telling.

Apognophos

Interesting, Marvin, though this admission only makes them consistent with their revocation of the ban on organ transplants. When they lifted the ban (or disapproving stance, at least) on transplants in 1980 they wrote that, contrary to what they stated in 1967, an organ transplant could not be considered nourishment in the manner of food because the organ was taking the place of the previous one that failed, and eventually was incorporated into the body and replaced cell by cell over time. This same argument would naturally hold true for blood as well, and it seems that the Society has decided to acknowledge that. But it's surprising that they would do so since this reasoning is supposed to be the link between the Jewish stance on eating blood and the JW stance on not taking blood!

180

Please post new forum feedback or questions here

by Simon in

well, the switchover happened - there were a couple of things i had to fix which meant the posting was disabled for longer than i planned but it's now enabled and some people have already posted.. if you have any questions about the new format or suggestions on how to improve it, please post them here.. if you are having trouble signing in or posting then you'll need to email me instead.. many thanks to everyone for their patience during the changeover !.

Apognophos

Have to make a separate post for an issue I just noticed. I see you added a quote-style button to the main toolbar, which is great. Unfortunately I cannot get the style to "turn off" in the way that it used to work on the old forum. Normally I could click the button again and it would remove the styling from the line I was on, and I could continue typing in the plain style after that point. The new button doesn't seem to work that way. All new lines created after invoking the quote style will get the quote style applied to them, and selecting the quote-style text and hitting the quote-style button doesn't undo the style.

180

Please post new forum feedback or questions here

by Simon in

well, the switchover happened - there were a couple of things i had to fix which meant the posting was disabled for longer than i planned but it's now enabled and some people have already posted.. if you have any questions about the new format or suggestions on how to improve it, please post them here.. if you are having trouble signing in or posting then you'll need to email me instead.. many thanks to everyone for their patience during the changeover !.

Apognophos

Many thanks, Simon, for correcting the forum text that I mentioned earlier, it makes me happy that I could contribute in some way. I just wanted to let you know that you missed one line:

Discuss anything Jehovah Witness, JW.org or WatchTower society related

is missing the "'s", and there's a couple capitalization issues. My suggestion would be:

Discuss anything Jehovah's Witness, JW.org or Watchtower Society related