Richard Dawkins should write a paper entitled "How not to run a Web 2.0 website." Perhaps apt that he is now the former Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, as he has shown little understanding of his public, which has also damaged his efforts at science communication. How can I make such bold statements?

The RichardDawkins.net website is currently undergoing a rapid form of punctuated evolution (some may even call it extinction). The flagship website of Dawkins is a fairly standard advertorial-style self-promotional Web 1.0 application apart from its forum, which has by far the highest amount of traffic and is the most popular science and atheism destination on the net. Why would Dawkins destroy this vibrant community, and at the same time anger a large part of his fan base?

You can read an insider's story here at Reality is my Religion. Peter Harrison, the blogger was a moderator at the Dawkins forum and the sequence of events as he tells them are an abject lesson in how not to handle changes in an online social networking community. The staff who manage the technical side of the website are Josh Timonen, Andrew Chalkley and a few others. They actually get paid for their work whilst the forum moderators seem to be all volunteers. Josh Timonen had made it known before that he thought the forum was not important and hence neither were the moderators. Except that his darling website would receive a small fraction of the traffic it does if it wasn't for the forum he so despises. Surely his server stats would have told him this simple fact?

Anyway, the rulers of the Dawkins universe, that is, Richard Dawkins himself and his trusted tech team, had obviously decided that they wanted to change the platform running the forum. By the sound of it the forum would have been closed down and replaced by what seems more like a bookmarking style site, or a MyLot clone, with threaded discussions but based around highly moderated themes. Why change something that is working?

The forum was having server problems due to the sheer volume of traffic but I don't think Dawkins is poverty-stricken: upgrade the server. Forums require a lot of moderation - I know, I've run forums before - there is no artificial intelligence that can patrol the ingenious malevolence of humans determined to spoil a forum; it needs people. I think they should have started to pay at least the main moderators. Instead, Timonen sends the mods a curt message saying that their services will no longer be needed on the new "discussion area". He knew what the response would be as he included warnings about any retaliatory action by the mods during the 30-day winding down period.

Now let's stop here for one moment. This is one of the busiest science forums on the whole internet. Whatever the delusions of Dawkins, Timonen and company were, the search engines would crucify the domain name if all the forum data were deleted. Admittedly, it would probably have been just archived but with no access for members the content would become static. However, "When an account is deleted, all the user’s posts are deleted too." The masters of the Dawkins-verse were creating black holes everywhere. Amazing!

Transforming a community can be painful but it can be handled by consensus with existing members. I have just gone through this at Xomba.com but they took their most loyal members with them at every stage and have even opened up a discussion forum where webmasters and members can discuss useful changes. This was promised by Timonen but then recanted and a diktat issued from on high. Once both moderators and members realized what was happening pandemonium followed. Timonen started his impersonation of God by changing forum settings and disabling various functions. People just wanted to exchange contact details so they could hook up elsewhere on the net - they were stopped from doing so.

"Opening threads and speaking our mind freely is why we are here. Not being able to do that, not being able to talk about different things, not being able to debunk bad ideas, and more… those are some of the things that we are here for." This was one of the more moderate responses. All the moderators felt betrayed at being treated not only as worthless but as potential saboteurs to boot!

A quote Richard Dawkins made in 2008:“It is a community, and that is a valuable part of it. Many of our forum threads have an atmosphere of friends going out for a drink and chatting. I think that is valuable, and I don’t think we should insist on sticking to serious topics. That would be a good way to stifle the sense of community, and that would be a real shame.”

Updates to this saga can be found again at Reality is my religion and a message from Richard Dawkins himself is a locked topic within the forum (so don't expect this link to work in the future).

Peter Harrison leaves open the possibility that Richard Dawkins is being duped by the few people he is actually paying. "... it is interesting that Josh and Andrew began wiping the admin logs after their actions. They deleted threads, then wiped the admin logs. They deleted members, then wiped the admin logs. Surely there would be no point in doing this, other than to hide the actions from Dawkins himself."

However, this means that Dawkins is too busy to oversee a website that carries his name and his reputation as a scientist, freethinker and atheist. Why would he condone the trashing of his own forum? Why alienate his supporters? These are people who buy his books and DVDs and thereby pay him money. He just needs to follow the trail and read what is happening. He then needs to make an informed judgement.

This is story is not necessarily about science communication except in as much as the forum was on science as well as atheism. But for a scientist and a science communicator to neither look closely at the evidence nor communicate with his public is shameful. The scientific method is not just for one's narrow field of expertise but can also be used in any investigation, and science communication is not just about preaching to the masses but also about keeping your friends close. Dawkins has publicly failed on both, whether through ignorance or wilfully is left to be seen.