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

Another point I thought was interesting, from the second half of the interview, was when Veitch says that conspiracists are "fetishizing" evil. They are obsessed with the supposed control that evil forces have over humankind and they make morbid videos about all the evil they are doing. It's an unhealthy fascination with the monsters supposedly lurking under mankind's collective bed.

It's been pointed out on the forum that Witnesses seem to talk about Satan more than Jesus at times, because they're fixated on the control that Satan has on this world. They like to remind people in their public talks and literature about the terrible things in the world and how badly we need to be saved from them.

This is not totally a coincidental alignment, as I think Veitch is saying that some conspiracists actually have religious views which are similar to the views of fundamentalists who believe that Satan is in control of our world. So really the conspiracists are sometimes related to the very sort of religion that we were a part of. Other times they only believe that men are behind these conspiracies (the Illuminati), or aliens (the greys).

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

Okay, sounds good. Though I'm curious about:

That is by design for SEO purposes

:-O You mean even the part where it says "Jehovah Witness"? :-/ It didn't say that on the old forum, did it?

Edit: Yay, my PM count is fixed, thank you!

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

Also, PMs carried over from the old forum have bare HTML in them. I'm pretty sure you already know about this, Simon. I know you said you could enable some markup for PMs, so hopefully they will stop looking like this at some point:

<br />
<br />"Here's a sample."

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

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.