Natural Philosopher Community Website Awakens

The Natural Philosophy Community website has finally come to life!  It takes time for people to get off their habit of having email conversations and move them to forums.  The community website is built using the world-wide standard BuddyPress. BuddyPress is WordPress’ community website that is a cross between WordPress and Facebook.  It has forums, status, friends, etc.   You can follow people you like, you can post status of your work, and join in conversations in the forums.

Advantage of Forums

Forums has a specific advantage over group emailings.  Yes, it is easy to respond to group emails but there are some real problems with them.  They are:

• You can’t leave them on your own
• People include you even if you don’t want to be a part of it
• If one person removes you, another may forget and you are back in
• There is no recording of some pretty amazing conversations that are lost forever

On the other hand, forums have distinct advantages. For each Group on the community website, there is a forum.  We have forums for the Structures group, Relativity, Gravity, Thermodynamics, Expansion Tectonics, the Philosophy or Science and so on.

Area 1: Forums

Forums are attached to groups and they are a place to discuss topics of interests.  There you can create “topics” or “threads” as they are known on the internet.  A topic is just that: a topic under the forum. For instance, the topic may be “Mechanisms for Earth Expansion and Growth” under the Expansion Tectonics forum. Here is a screen dump of our forums page which you can find by clicking on “Forums” at the top of the website.

Forums have distinct advantages:

• You don’t get stuck in an email group you can’t leave
• You can “subscribe” to any topic you like and get email alerts
• You and anyone else can see what others have wrote at anytime
• There is a history of the conversations – they are not lost like in group emails.

Here is the forums homepage for the Natural Philosophy Community website:

Forums: each forum is associated with a group

Area 2: Site-Wide Activity Status

This is a place where you tell EVERYONE on the site about your status. For instance, you could say “I published my book! Here is a link!”.  Here is the Activity home page you get to by clicking on “Activity” on the top of the website:

Site-wide Activity Status

Area 3: Group Homepage Status

Below, is the homepage for the Expansion Tectonics group.  If you type in there, it is not in a forum but is a simple “status” for those to read in the Expansion Tectonics group.  For instance, you may have found an interesting article for everyone to read.  You can include a link by click on the “link in a circle”, make a short comment, and then click on “Post Update”.

Home page for the Expansion Tectonic Group

Join the Conversation!

So register for the site if you already have not and join the conversation! It is a much more efficient and useful way to interact instead of random emails. See you in the Community!

-David de Hilster, CNPS webmaster