Has the bias made this forum essentially irrelevant?

Thread copied here from the Has the bias made this forum essentially irrelevant? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

I didn't want to hijack Bolder-dash's thread by posting before he'd had a chance to respond, but it's been a couple days, so I'll say a little bit about why I promoted this thread.First, if Bolder-dash would like to discuss moderation then Adminnemooseus created a thread for that a while back: General Discussion Of Moderation Procedures (aka 'The Whine List')But what intrigued me about Bolder-dash's thread proposal was the suggestion that activity at EvC Forum has diminished. I'm not sure what he's basing this on. I'm going from memory a bit, but I think 2009 had around 52,000 posts, 2010 had 57,000, and this year projects out at 45,000. Moderation hasn't changed in any significant way that I'm aware of during this period.We do have a creationist moderator, AdminSlev, and the couple times that AdminSlev has responded to Bolder-dash he's been ignored.But while I can't produce any statistics, I do believe that Bolder-dash is correct that creationist participation at EvC Forum is significantly diminished, particularly informed creationist participation. I have been noting this change since the beginning of 2006, shortly after Judge Jones released his Kitzmiller vs. Dover decision.In my mind Dover and reduced creationist participation here are intimately connected. The Kitzmiller decision marked the end of creationist and ID efforts to overtly promote their views as science within public school systems. This seems to have reduced how much creationists know about their own views. Dover marked the beginning of not only a period of diminished numbers of IDists here, it also increased the number of traditional creationists notable by how little knew, not only about science but even about the very creationist views they were promoting.In the old days, incoherent and irrational creationists like Ray Martinez were outnumbered by those like Tranquility Base, TrueCreation and Peter Borger. Today our creationist ranks are dominated by those who lack both knowledge and rationality, like Dawn Bertot, Robert Byers, and, when he loses patience, Bolder-dash himself.I take this change as an indication that while we've won the public battle, the war itself has retreated to less public arenas. There's now less public dialog between the two sides, but the creationist movement is very successfully cementing itself even more firmly among evangelicals. Their new strategy of avoiding public conflict with science (and the public defeats that go with it) while still influencing schools at the local level must be considered a success. The ICR and Discovery Institute approach of aggressively taking on science is becoming more and more a thing of the past.This means our big "victory" at Dover was hollow, as I predict all such victories will be. The creation/evolution wars will continue to ebb and flow. It will only be a matter of time before creationists develop new strategies for attacking the science they think is wrong, and then creationist participation will increase again.Edited by Admin, : Grammar.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I liked them, too. There's three reasons I don't post them anymore:

1. Each time the webhost control panel is reinstalled the history is lost, introducing discontinuities and inaccuracies. It shouldn't be necessary to reinstall the control panel very often, but somehow or other things come up that make it necessary. Last year it was the hackers. The year before that it was upgrading the server. The year before that it was changing webhosting companies. And so on.
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2. The way the information is presented changes with each control panel version, sometimes in minor ways, sometimes in major ways.
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3. The number of search engines now scanning the site on a daily basis has skewed the numbers so as to be meaningless. Besides Google, Yahoo and Bing there are a number of others.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Hi Dawn,You didn't say anything about the topic.Bolder-dash believes that diminishing creationist participation here is due to moderation bias that favors the evolution side. I believe that Dover had a chilling effect on creationism and ID, causing a dramatic decline in their efforts to educate their adherents, with the result that creationists who come here today like yourself are far less prepared to debate creation/evolution than their predecessors from the pre-Dover period.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

When I'm moderating I post as Admin.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director