Does anyone know? I haven’t been able to get to it in a week. I tried logging in and it didn’t take what I thought was my password so I did a “forgot password” request. After a few minutes I got a link to reset my password but when I tried to change my password it said the link was invalid. Is anyone else having this problem? Is anyone currently able to post on Philosophy Now forums?
Thanks. Much appreciated.
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Good news!
I took a little gander and it looks just like the old ILP. I like our new format much better. I don’t have to put my glasses on to read it. For one. #oldlady
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Until next time PN peeps… it was nice having you, for a while 
Does anyone know what’s going on with the Philosophy Now website? It’s been down for a couple of days and there’s no option in the menu bar of the main screen for “forums” anymore. Did Rick do away with the forums?
Thanks.
Did you notice the large influx of users the last two days the forum was functional? Did you happen to check the current user count? At points there were upwards of 5,000 users visiting the board simultaneously. The forums were being flooded by bots. Did you notice any lag when visiting?
Additionally did you notice the Taylor Swift discussions on the forum? They were posted two days before the forums went down. Here is a summary:
Someone was trying to bury the thread:
I’m pretty sure Taylor Swift has nothing to do with the Philosophy Now website being down. Rick might be fixing the site to get rid of some of the bots, however, there’s no option to select the forum on the PN index page. So I was wondering if Rick had decided to discontinue having the forum part of the site. I think there was some discussion a while back concerning discontinuing the forum to streamline things so that bots aren’t slowing down the Website.
Obviously Taylor Swift did not personally deploy bots upon the forum.
However there was a concerted effort to react to my understandably offensive comments from May 2022 on the Philosophy Now message boards. Review the evidence presented above. What resulted was in essence a smear campaign against me.
What happened to the Philosophy Now forum was an intentional, targeted attack. More than 5,000 bots were unleashed upon the boards. They register, login, attempt posts, etcetera.
There is no real profit to be made from Philosophy Now forums, only 20 or so people regularly use and visit the forum. Bots were not deployed for that purpose. They are deployed to disrupt website use and access. As a method to force shutdown of a specific page, and it worked. They attempted this during the C-virus panic with the Philosophy Now forums. They flooded the forums with thousands of bots to disrupt the system because people were questioning the events. It is a form of dissident control.
Hi Gary, I emailed Rick yesterday to find out what was going on, and he graciously replied with the following…
Hi Keith,
Yes, it is the same old problem - waves of bots coming onto the forum which slow down not only the forum but also the main Philosophy Now site, to the extent that it doesn’t even load properly. Bora has a plan to fix it, but there are complications with that plan and he is also working on another project under great time pressure. Therefore as a temporary fix we have taken down the forum so that the rest of the Philosophy Now site loads properly. We don’t know how long this is all going to take but I fear it will be weeks rather than days. We’ll put up a page explaining this, but for technical reasons even this might take us a few days.
Glumly
Rick
Weeks, not days.
See, the main page is no longer disrupted. Rick admits even the main page was disrupted when the bots were active. The goal was accomplished, forcing shutdown of the forum, now the disruption stops.
These are targeted disruptions. There is no profit to gain from 30 regular Philosophy Now forum users. No view count to boost for ad ratings or whatever like Youtube. These are intentional operations intended to control dissident expression.
Rick has mentioned that the bots are LLMs using the forum to learn language. There are a lot of them out there now and it may not be intentional to disrupt the PN forum but just a side effect of companies unleashing thousands of LLMs to roam the Internet for various purposes. I doubt it’s the quell dissent. If it were to quell dissent they could just focus their bots on certain language algorithms. These bots, on the contrary, are basically bringing the whole site down for everyone–dissenters and non-dissenters.
I would try to let go of the conspiracy stuff. It’s a form of irrational thinking. You don’t have proof that your theories are true and it is more likely that none of us are all that important that there is anyone conspiring against us. It’s just not realistic thinking.
Conspiracy garbage.They most likely go to whichever sites are easiest to infiltrate. Like water taking the ‘paths of least resistance’. Either that or it’s to see how well bots can fool people. The bot ‘Age’ needs to be removed from the PN forum forever. I’m sure that would improve things. And it doesn’t help that fools keep responding to obvious bots in the ‘introduce yourself’ thread. Not looking at anyone in particular…Gary…
Here’s some people talking about this problem on a research site I’ve never heard of.
Thanks, Seeds. I figured it was bot traffic bringing it down. Every scientific advance seems to screw something up somewhere. It’s like medicine and side effects. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is worse.
They did focus the wave. It was focused on the forum and effectively disrupted it to the point of closure.
Such a massive wave is not constant nor does it serve any practical purpose, thus evidently directed.
Yes, bots have functions. However bots can be directed and released upon targeted sites subsequently performing said functions en masse as a means to disrupt the system.
Someone linked a random article above. Did that activity effectively crash the site? What specifically was contained on the page? Is there revenue to gain, unlike Philosophy Now? Does it contain questionable material which may be addressed by such means? Referencing a random article does not make the argument for you.
Nations have astronomical amounts of resources invested in network security and related issues yet some seem to believe stuff like this doesn’t happen?
You must consider it in context with the other evidence presented along with the timing.
Discounting realities because one is acclimated to thoughtless normality is more a sign of irrational thinking.
Yeah, much more likely that Taylor Swift read your pathetic comment and decided to send a bot wave to take down the site, with your ‘proof’ being that she used one word in a song that you also used in your comment, or did you include ‘and’ and ‘the’? How do you even function out there?
This is just pure speculation, but isn’t it possible that the problem is being caused by some basement dwelling, tech-savvy, previous forum member who Rick banned for being a jerk, and is now seeking revenge on Rick?
Your statement is obviously false.
It concerns much more as illustrated above.
The name reference which is obvious.
“Haze” is another term for “persecute”. Motive to persecute is present considering my offensive 2022 comments on the Philosophy Now forum.
Ms. Swift crawls on the floor which is a reference to the “Ugh. You make my skin crawl” comment of May 2022 from the Abortion section of the Philosophy Now forum. Original URL:
https://forum.philosophynow.org/viewtopic.php?p=571244#p571244
Archived URL:
Ms. Swift spitefully surrounds herself with lavender flowers and lavender water after I had explicitly expressed no desire to be around promiscuous people. Original URL:
https://forum.philosophynow.org/viewtopic.php?p=571513#p571513
Archived URL:
Also review the URL of Ms. Swift’s Youtube video: h8DLofLM7No. It contains “h8DL” or “hate DL” and DL are my initials.
Review the video:
All that in conjunction with the referenced articles:
Taylor Swift: A Philosopher For Our Times, October 2024
Taylor Swift and Philosophy: Essays from the Tortured Philosophers Department, September 2024
Know thyself − all too well: Why Taylor Swift’s songs are philosophy, April 2024
…along with the timing suggest this is an intentional, concerted and real effort.
You are completely insane. There’s no connection whatsoever. You are simply looking for ‘connections’ to suit your claim. Classic pseudoscience. You don’t own the word ‘lavender’. It’s pretty common actually. The scent helps with sleep. And why would anyone give a crap about your particular comments? They are unmemorable at best. Why doesn’t this forum have the same problem then? Are your comments not considered ‘dangerously dissident’ on here too? 
Nothing will change your mind though. You are fully immersed in the ‘cult of conspiracy’ and only a full lobotomy will ever cure that.
ps. Her songs are utter crap.
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