CHANGES COMING TO THE FAIR MESSAGE BOARD
As FAIR continues to grow and evolve, we make changes to better meet
our goals. A major change we will be making within the next week is to
divest ourselves of the FAIR Message Board, turning their operation
over to one of the current moderators. The Message Board will continue
with a new name of Mormon Apologetic & Discussion Board, or MAAD. The
URL will be http://www.MormonApologetics.org.
Well, I suppose this means that I will have to change from referring to it as "the ironically named FAIRboard," to the "fittingly named MAADboard". (I assume that the new acronym will be pronounced that same as "Mad.") A further thought: which mod will be taking over? Dan G.? Juliann? Just imagine the pressure! The whole "shell game" they had to play in order to skirt around responsibility ought to provide some indication.
FAIR was born from LDS individuals posting on Internet message boards,
so this is a big step for us. But we believe this change will remove
the confusion from people’s minds about whether or not FAIR endorses
the posts on the message boards, allow more freedom for the posters,
and allow FAIR to focus our resources.
Such a strange sentence. I have said before that it seems to me that FAIR has long tried to shirk off any and all accountability for the material therein. This is evident even in Mr. John Lynch's letter to me on the blog, in which he said that FAIR is not "affiliated" with the LDS Church in any way whatsoever.
Message boards are a valuable
discussion medium, but the format does not universally appeal to
people who come to FAIR looking for answers. FAIR will, in turn,
devote our scarce resources to enhancing the FAIR wiki
(http://www.fairwiki.org) and providing more international articles.
I am unsure what he means by "international articles". Intriguing, though. What I anticipate happening is that the fittingly named MAAD board will just be a sounding-board for the fairwiki material.
At this point all decisions and management have been given over to
the new MAAD management team. In the very near future the old URL
for the message boards (http://www.fairboards.org) will be retired,
and the message boards will have a new look and feel. FAIR will
maintain a hands-off policy and does not endorse the actions nor the
posts on this new message board.
The notion of a "hands-off policy" in conjunction with anything FAIR-related seems totally alien to me.
Those who currently post on the FAIR
message boards won’t need to do anything differently, other than
create a bookmark on their computer to the new URL. For a short time
we will continue to have a pointer from the FAIR Web site, but after
a reasonable amount of time has passed, we will be removing the link.
Given that I am one of those message board junkies, I’m sure that you
will still see me occasionally at the new message board. See ya
there!
–Scott Gordon
President
Well, if you will allow me to participate, then perhaps I will see you there too, Scotty-dog!
In any case, this is huge! I can hardly believe that FAIR is going to go the way of the dodo. Stunning, stunning news. Of course, it is impossible to avoid speculating on the causes underlying this....