How Should We Treat Time Travelers?

I understand your point. However, being an individual is the spice of life. I hardly ever entered the "kid thread" because it's absurdity was off the charts...not my cup of tea. I love a good debate! Foul criticisms aside, I learned (as everyone does) a great deal from those debates. Two or more brains locked into a deep discussion is much more powerful and enlightening than any one man band will ever be. I say these claimants need to lean the term "touche" and use it when they know they've been pwned.

In the famous words of a woman I absolutely despise "I'ma be me"!

Agreed. It isn't so much that we believe anything these people post. It's a webmastering strategy to gain more content and in the long run, a more active site.

Oi Cosmo! Was that me that you singled out back there?

LARFF!

I understand where Num and you are coming from. This site would be unsustainable if it simply pandered to the 30 minute wonders who professed to be from 3127 and talked existential gobbledygook. It would be even worse where there to be a policy of promoting that and not showing due regard for those people like me who have weathered every change in Administration this site has seen. Don't forget, I was Member number 11 originally and I've been here since before the Board originally went live. I don't know how I ended up member 109 or where my other 2,761 posts went though???

That said, I think the idea of dividing content on these claims is a good one. I don't think that they should be in seperate Categories or divided from what is the TT area of the Board. I do think that there should be a claim thread that any TT'er... or erm, Vampire can start at their will and that must only be a Q+A thread about their story. I think that once such a thread is started, our Admin should open an Analysis thread right next door. That's where we, the critics can debate the claim material. I think, should the new Claimant choose to join the Analysis thread, then they subscribe to being ripped a new arse if their claim doesn't stand criticism as they have chosen to enter the analysis thread. If they choose to remain in the Q+A thread where I promise that I would play nice, then they must not, should not be subject to critical analysis which doesn't address their tale in a positive fashion.

It could be difficult to Police, but wrong posts in the wrong thread can simply be moved with no need for Mod-queue. It would irritate me no end if a post I had made was waiting on someone vetting what I had to say. If you're going to sanction Thought-Police tactics, you will lose Members. I would subscribe to having a post Moved if it is incorrect in intent. I'd prefer it to be 'Unapproved' right where it was with a chance for me to edit it, or agree that it needed moving, but if it's clear, and I do mean crystal clear, what will and will not be accepted in a Q+A type thread, I won't post the wrong stuff where it shouldn't be anyway. Caveat Lector: I would wish a free run the analysis type thread though as I am sure many would.

I can play the game as well as any, I have done as far back as Antares in the old TTF.tk Board. The rules where clear then and Phoenix enforced them without fear nor favour. I don't tend to swear much in threads although I can be insulting in my own way, so clamping down on the use of expletives in a Q+A thread would be a given in this event. I think that an Analysis thread would be much more open to interpretation and reasoned objection from the Admin, or other Members, where expletives or insults appeared.

I understand what it is that you are trying to do. I understand the reasons for this. As a Member of long standing I do not wish to make this a difficult thing for you to achieve. I do want some measure of freedom to criticise what I may see as a most preposterous tale and I would like room to critically shred it if I wished to do so with any like minded Members. I will respect the sanctity of any main Q+A style thread that comes with a too-fantastic-to-believe story.

Your humble Savant: Grayson

@Grayson

I think that's an awesome take on the idea I put up; more fleshed out and is pretty much what I was going for. Forgive me my inarticulacies I've been on my polyphasic kick for over a week now LOL

Thou art forgiven your... inarticulacies? Is that a word?

You a TT'er? You're now inventing words as you go.

LARFF

It is now. LOL I could probably do better than any of these guys.

ok 7 I hear ya and I promise to play nice
but just for the record like Grayson said ,,,I too don't particularly like beeing taken for a fool/idiot or to stupid to smell a load of crap,, when its served up for digestion..

Chip,

With "frog" that part is sad enough. But it was actually worse. If The Kid or anyone else offered to sell him a gadget like the HDR for $375 he'd be saving his rent money to buy the damned thing. More than once I had to "take him aside" in PM on Anomalies or TTI and suggest that he maybe talk it over with his parents or his brother Aaron before spending his rent on a POS gadget.

As vile as it is for HDRkid (or anyone else) to have tried that, I think his caretakers bear the responsibility. Holding the website responsible because they didn't have enough attack dogs isn't reasonable.

Glad he had someone willing to look out for him though Frog was a cool guy.

When the database was given back a large portion of it was corrupted during transit. By the time I noticed this you had already deleted your copy of it and we had to make do with what was available

So that's where all my hard work on 9/11 went!!! I want compensation!!

How many handjobs is that?

I wasn't aware it was corrupted. I remember issue with the 'posts' field not propagating properly...

I didn't delete my original Jelsoft copy, or the IPB copy from February 2005. Backatcha!

LOL, that would be your first hint it was corrupted

Somehow the posts table got all screwed up when you uploaded it for me to retrieve. The thread titles were present but were just empty shells past a certain point. Lot of good content got lost.

Here: http://paranormalis.com/threads/threads-we-lost.2000/
And here: http://paranormalis.com/pages/lost-threads-of-paranormalis/

I bet Num would appreciate getting those back if you were able Over 1700 conversations were lost.

Oooooooooohhhh, now I remember. I must've slept since then.

So, the screwup was caused during the upload?

How big was the copy that I gave you?

It was so long ago I can't really remember... I'll see if I can find the email where I tried explaining the problem but the jist of it was if you look at the database, you'll see it just kind of cuts off at the end. Now that I think about it, it may have been a corruption exporting it from phpMyAdmin; it can happen with gigantic databases like that when the memory limit gets exceeded or it times out.

Fortunately for us the posts table seemed to be the last one in the database (or at least the last vital one) so the users, thread titles and so on were all present.

Crack open your copy in a text editor (Notepad++ won't time out with giant files) and see if the end closes itself out nicely, or there's just an abrupt ending in the middle of an entry.

If Grayson's copies aren't the corrupted ones I got, it wouldn't be hard to merge it all back in.

You'd have to import it to separate vBulletin installation, weed it down to just the lost threads and then import the remainder into Paranormalis. Users could be merged afterwards. Not hard, just... Time consuming.