I guess we're going to have to be more careful about posting, which is no bad thing. As a workaround you could edit the post to leave just a single character or the word 'delete' or whatever, and PM me a link to the post (which you can get from the post's timestamp) and I can then delete it (or another mod).

But okay, I'll add it to the list. I suspect it's an opinionated software decision, meaning they'll say no. I respect that attitude as it happens.

New members, have a look at the useful hints and tips:
http://thephilosophyforum.com/page/useful-hints-and-tips

Welcome to the two and only @unenlightened and @StreetlightX. What took you so long? Welcome too to @Helvetica, @schopenhauer1, and anyone else I've missed.

Okay I'll try some different colours tomorrow

Calm your boner SUPERADMIN — The outlaw Josey Wales

I had to laugh at that one.

Yeah it won't work on mobile. Yet more reason to ask for the feature.

I think we should also try to think of different ways of doing things, organizing things, or whatever. As you'll have noticed, I unimaginatively set this site up mostly in accordance with PF.

Off the top...reading groups that we all participate in, say one philosophical paper a month or something (reading groups don't have to be full books). First suggestion, an easy read: "The Extended Mind" by Clark and Chalmers.

I'm also going to do an analysis of the site's SEO-friendliness and if there are big issues I'll add them as feature requests to send to the developers.

The site gets 65% on seositecheckup.com (or something like that--it was yesterday I did it). Many of the problems it flags up are not that serious.

Pass the popcorn.

Not sure about those Mol. I'll come back to them.

Oh and I added a quasi-shoutbox in The Lounge: http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/28/the-shoutbox

When you hover over the discussion title the tooltip shows you the category. But I agree it would be nice to see it right next to the title without having to do that, so I've added it to the list.

Yeah, I was shocked to see that deleted. And I wasn't the only one...

It's a great idea Tiff. Note that it's The Philosophy Forum, singular. I always hated that plural nonsense.

It takes time for Google to like you. It comes down roughly to (a) site structure, load speed and other software issues, (b) how many other sites link to this site along with how much Google likes those sites, and (c) high quality changing content that's relevant to people's searches. There are many other aspects but I haven't been paying attention to SEO for the past couple of years.

PF is at the top because of its age, reliability, crawlability, and masses of high quality content. Its rise to the top of the search results is one of Paul's great successes. If we can get as much high quality philosophical discussion going as possible, as soon as possible, we'll have some chance of picking up people from Google. But the competition is immense and it won't happen any time soon.

The Google bot has visited the site, I think, but it didn't stay for long. It may be back in the next couple of weeks, and hopefully then it'll take a closer look and index more pages.

There may be some technical barriers here. It's possible that this forum software is not very SEO-friendly, and because I'm not in control of it I can't quickly make the necessary changes. However, technical issues, i.e., aspect (a), are the least important when it comes to pleasing Google; if there's relevant content here the bot will find it.

One thing I can do is set up a Google Analytics account and add the site to Google Webmaster Tools. They'll help me see how the site is performing month to month.

The last thing this fledgling forum should have to deal with right now is TGW, Kwalish Kid and John Sartoris all joining at about the same time. :o

or your money back?

Yep, there's a subscriber role set up. Just have to decide what to do with it, if anything.

Good man, thanks! As far as I know you can't show off your subscriber status. I would draw the line at purple names anyway. ;)

I've turned on the subscribe page, and it links through to my PayPal business account (CommissionCrowd) at the moment because I don't have one dedicated to this forum.

Moderators and admins don't see the link, which is in the top menu. Mods who want to see the link, just sign out.

I still have to write something to put there. And we still need to decide on what privileges subscribers get. We can hide certain categories from non-subscribers, disallow certain actions (like posting), show adverts, etc.

I intend there to be a social aspect to the forum, and I think most members are happy with that. But there's an easy solution for you: click on 'Categories' and uncheck the category called 'The Lounge', so all those social type discussions won't appear in your home page, ie. in your 'All discussions' screen.

Oh and be nice if it's at all possible. Your comment there was the first sour note since I set this up, and it's kind of disappointing.

Also, the white background is too bright for my eyes, but that can be solved later if you implement some sort of skin system. Or am I missing it? — discoii

Yeah I can customize the colours, but only admin can do it and this would apply globally, i.e., you can't pick your own colours as far as I know. Personally I like the white, but I might try something else and see what everyone thinks.

Yeah, I find the default way too small, which is why I have my browser zoomed to 125% for this site. Ctrl+ twice, and it scales up nicely. It's good at even higher zooms too if you want to fill the screen.

Note that a relatively a low number of words per line, i.e., narrow columns, is good user-experience design, hence the typical newspaper and book formats. Having to scan all the way across the screen slows down reading.

Welcome! What don't you like about it?

Hi Tiff, welcome aboard! Thanks for this. Yes I'm on the free trial at the moment and have to start paying November 3rd I think, $49/month so long as we don't outgrow the limits for that plan. There's a subscription option in admin which I intend to turn on soon. I guess what it does is add a page where members can subscribe (donate). I'll post here when I get somewhere with it.

https://plushforums.com/pricing

Thanks again :)

8-)

I've added this to my list of nice-to-have features here: http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/224#Post_224

Notice that normal replies work rather like PF's internal replies, in that they're fast and don't require a page load. The challenge might be to resist the temptation to fire off short replies most of the time.

Welcome folks, good to have you all on board. Now get philosophizing. :)

So I'm going to email the developers to request some features. I get a feeling they're pretty conservative, happy with the software as it is, but there's no harm in asking. Here's my list so far:

• Reporting posts. To make moderation easier it would be good if posts could be reported or flagged.
• It would be good to have another option in the user's profile along with a user's comments, discussions and mentions: discussions they have taken part in.
• Muted discussions. When you don't want to see a discussion appear in the main discussions screen.

What else? I'll edit this post to add more.

I think they could encourage good behaviour.

Haven't noticed the time problem. The second one looks like expected behaviour: it's assuming your first name is The. This software is geared more to communities where people use their real names: within businesses, universities, etc.

Sounds like good advice The.

Just a note to say these are great replies and I'm not responding just because of my broken arm—which I keep going on about, but only because I don't want people to think I'm ignoring them.

Incidentally, I see that you can get a post's permalink from the time posted, bottom left of the post.

I pretty much agree with the OP, and also with @Pneumenon. But here's a thought...

Disquotationalism might still seem to fit naturally with a kind of deflationary realism. For deflationary realists, the task is a defensive one, to deny the unwarranted metaphysical excursions of idealism in favour of what is ordinarily evident, from life and science: I share with others a world that's often surprising—I often literally don't know what's around the next corner—and I've seen the bones of creatures that lumbered over the Earth a hundred million years ago, long before all human consciousness. The world transcends my self, my ideas, my thoughts, and at certain points the entire intersubjective world and the whole of history. It is as real as you can get.

This is naive, unphilosophical realism, and it's what the deflationary realist is defending. The idealist comes along and tries to reduce the world to a known substance or structure, that of the mental, or discourse, etc. This metaphysical move the realist cannot allow. But the deflationary realist is not offering a competing metaphysics on what the world is, but only affirming that it exceeds our bounds, as is merely evident. And this is why he wants to abandon correspondence. Correspondence is, usually, a classically realist theory, but it is too metaphysical, too positive for the deflationary realist. For him there can be no question of language vs the world, or anything that opens the door to talk of what reality is really like. Disquotationalism could be part of a suite of deflationary tactics designed to criticize idealist metaphysics.

Where'd he mention you?

Question 1: What's the mention?

Question 2: The tweeting bird??? (Not familiar with Twitter)

Question 3: How much stuff can be in the used archive until it's full? — ssu

1. So I'll try mentioning @Hanover and see what happens. I guess it links to the profile, and I think he gets a notification he's been mentioned too.

2. You can paste in a tweet's permalink, and it embeds the tweet within your post like this:

3. What archive? Do you mean uploaded files? Posts are unlimited and on the current plan we've got 20GB storage space for files in total.

Is "Woo" really a category now? — Human

Not any more. It was a moment of madness.

When your mouse pointer is hovering over your post you should see an edit button appear underneath the body of the post, just to the right of the time. If you're on mobile you could probably tap your post to make it appear.

One real question to everyone, is there a way to get a listing of only the threads you've participated in like existed on that other site I used to frequent? I used to use the "My Threads" button, but I can't find one here. I tried to cut and paste theirs over here, but it doesn't work that way. — Hanover

I don't think so, but you can bookmark discussions to list them under your bookmarks. Also kind of maybe relevant is that you get notifications when people quote you or reply to you. It would be nice though, I agree. I'll see what Mr PlushForums says about it.