Mark

Huguenot Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > You do feel incredibly safe in Singapore. does it feel, you know, boring? Is there no edginess? What's the punishment over there for dropping litter? Do they send offenders on tree hugging courses?

the site address has been put back

yes it did, and by going to other local resources and openly promoting it it increased to 2, then 3, 4 etc etc

it's a forum that has 1 post on it, that's not really a resource. because we believe the link was put there by the person who started the other forum. Having a link to it from a site such as this will get it rankings with search engines. And that's spamming. They were sent a private message politely explaining the reason but they did it again so instead of saying sorry and re-instating it we've decided to keep it off. But now we've put it back. And when someone shows you a site that's potentially competition to this site, it's not really in this site's interest to promote it or am I missing something? [edited once]

The five would be myself and hopefully Mockney and I have no ideas who the other three would be. Perhaps Char1ie, would you like to come along and offer your services? There's also Tom who on another thread has discussed the forum I shall ask him.

sorry, should have been 5 (I think I got carried away with the G8 bit)

you're doing great Char1ie, thanks. Please come to the forum's birthday on the 21st so I can hear more, in fact I'm think of setting up a forum committee/discussion group/cabinet/G8 type group to discuss the forum. Just 8 people in a room (maybe in a bar) to talk about the forum. We may decide to do nothing but it would be nice to bounce ideas around and help some locals who are currently not getting the most out of this forum. oh yeah, I've had the title of this thread changed and the link to the other forum changed so that it doesn't benefit from us.

cheers Brendan. I believe there is already an East Dulwich area on Facebook and it lists the forum as its website. I like the school newsletter idea, I may have to clean up the forum and make it more parent friendly (whatever that means), perhaps a parent and child area... Beermats cost, but I would be willing to go into it with another local business.

I know, you are one of the users macroban that I don't like getting annoyed. Unfortunately it's not possible (at the moment) to split a thread because of the way people reply to a message. They have about 3 options: quote this message, reply to this message, fill in the box at the bottom, and having these 3 makes it easier and encourages people to reply. Imagine if someone replies to the 3rd message (out of 5) in a thread using "reply to this message", then a reply to that subsequent message is also associated to the 3rd message. This means that in the background the threads are branching out and it's not possible to make a clean split. Ideally threads could be split based on time posted but unfortunately that's not possible but we are looking into to. Oh, and I keep using the royal "we" by the way. It's just me, with some gratefully appreciated help from Mockney Piers.

How would you suggest that this forum promotes itself? Can you help with marketing? All ideas welcome

when I first moved to East Dulwich about 6 years ago there was this girl, late teens, scrawny who had bloody and scratched arms who came up to me on Lordship Lane and in a hysterical way say how she had been attacked and just wanted to get a train home and needed some money. I gave her a fiver and offered to go with her to the police and report it but she said it had been her boyfriend and she just wanted to get home and get over it. Anyway the next day and a week later at Victoria station was the same girl trying the same scam. Now you have to be desperate to scratch up your own arms so they bleed in order to get the sympathy vote but I guess it worked for her.

Would you like to look after it? Please?

I've been thinking about that too. So to clarify, do you mean splitting the Lounge into two? A new place where off-topic threads are moved to, a kind of serious older brother room to the Lounge. The Drawing Room? The Study? How about "Outside"? Off-topic threads can be moved "Outside", the Administrator can tell people to "take it Outside".

I think one of the ways to achieve the above is to be stricter on the East Dulwich gossip / issues thread. A typical dilemma is a thread entitled " Horray for plastic bags" which was moved to the Lounge as it wasn't specifically about East Dulwich. We informed the poster (of the message) it was moved and he wasn't happy as "it is relevant to East Dulwich", but I had to say that it's not specific to East Dulwich. Anyway he's never posted again and that annoys me as it feels like a decision to clear up and make that area less "chatty" has annoyed and subsequently turned off one of the users. Business have been encouraged to post their events on the forum but hardly any of them do. Some of them do post up their shops/services/offers in the offered section but not many even though it's free and 700 people a day visit the site. Businesses have been offered the opportunity to advertise and a few have (and benefited a surprisingly large amount). We'd love to get more people and their businesses on this site but we don't have the resources to promote it to them, we rely on word of mouth and internet searches. Please do come along on the 21st September Tom and let me know more about what you think, and anyone else who is reading this, we'd like to hear more ideas from the people who use this forum. We don't want the forum to just be a chat room for the "old loons", it's meant to be a fun and useful place for all the people (including businesses) of East Dulwich.

I'd go out on the piss with the Queen, get her really drunk and then get her to light one of her own farts.

Originally some threads were closed off for being off topic and too "chatty" but people complained to now they're tossed into the Lounge which a compromise. It's also quite hard to draw the line as to when a thread actually becomes a free for all, try and make that decision on a thread yourself then watch how it comes back on topic, then off, then on etc etc. It's always good to get feedback so thanks, let me know any other ideas or thoughts as we don't know what people think unless they tell us.

At the forum's birthday party we have to supply our own music, they have a setup that can play CDs and has an iPod lead so here's an invite to people in this here music room to bring along some tunes to play some background music. Here's your chance to impress each other with what you really have and not just your youtube references. Oh, if no-one takes up this offer I'll locking the doors when the party's full and playing Brotherhood of Man, Angelo on a continuous loop.

Sorry, I was just being pedantic really, trying to make sure that Mad World realised that these days science and medicine don't just come from the West. I think that labelling current medicine either Eastern or Western is kiiding some people that there is now a global world of science, but yes I agree that eastern and western is more appropriate when talking about the old school medicinal world. I'll get over it. [edited once]

Mad World, please stop being regionally prejudice and calling scientific advances in medicine "western medicine". Until you do so I shall call you Brian.

MadWorld74 Wrote: >I'm talking about the 'ancient eastern medicines' compaired to our scientific laboratory proven medicines in the west. Christ on a bible, don't you understand that there are scientific laboratory proven medicines coming from the East as well? I even showed an example of a medical study from the East.

MadWorld74, please stop calling it western scientific medicines. Look here: A case of ileocecal cancer associated with old tuberculosis from the National Hospital Organization Kyushu, Japan. Which is in the East. It is Eastern Science. Please don't dismiss it by saying that Dawkins is only talking about western scientific medicines. Science in the East is no longer purely this romanticised image of whispy haired old men casting wise words, they may still be whispy haired but they do have lab coats over there.

Yes, scientists did believe bleeding worked but they don't do that any more because better methods came along, it's called advancement. Imagine if they still continued to use them but they didn't actually work, then you could have a go at science. But yes, I agree creating better conditions for the body to heal itself should be taken more seriously. When you have the flu and go to the doctors she will says take some rest, the reason being that when your body is not having to work on your limbs moving, that energy can go towards fighting the bug. Now if you went a faith healer and lay down for an hour and relax, bingo, just what the doctor ordered, you will feel better. I think some of it comes down to how you wrap up chilling out, relaxing and re-composing yourself. Either do that with meditation, reading a nice book, a cup of tea and a chat to your mum or with a healer or all of them but please don't undermine people's trust in proven medicines when you do so. blinder999, perhaps if ?10 million hadn't been spent on the Homoeopathic hospital refurbishment you may have had a better experience at the clinic. Maybe not, but it's worth thinking about. [edited once]

It think it's great to have your review on here MadWorld74, I'm glad that you watched it and I'm not being sarcastic here. Last week you dismissed it without watching it and this time you've seen it and I'm glad and it's appreciated. It's strangely endearing that we disagree that as to which "side" is not being open minded here, faith healers who will not have tests done to prove they're right or the scientists* who want to find out more and potentially discover new and helpful medicine. *scientists these days are both Eastern and Western.

Please can we just agree that science is not just the Pharmaceutical industry, yes they are involved but please don't forget the science departments at universities, the British Medical Association, the Science Museum in London (well worth taking the kids to I have to add) etc etc. One of the aims of the programme, and I know it sounds obvious, is to make people aware of how you shouldn't take for granted things that you read in the media (including the internet and that includes this forum). People can easily debunk hundreds of years of evidence based science with phrases such as "back hander...in the pharmaceutical industry", "homeopathy [sic] isn't giving placeboes [sic]" and "Western pharmacuetical[sic] munching, peer reviewed world". Question science, that's what science is all about, but please be prepared to back up what you say. You have to agree that in some situations saying "believe it will heal" will not work whereas "administer some adrenalin and re-start the heart" will and we know this because of science. Rather like the judicial system, the peer review system is not 100% perfect, however medical journals that show them are rated by a global scale for their integrity. The Lancet and the BMJ score highly whereas the Daily Mail and Richard & Judy do not. Unfortunately people are in the habit of taking for granted what they read and see in the latter and the programme was saying that we should be careful that they don't undo the hard work that science (which is not just the Pharmaceutical companies) have done. From these reviews we can make judgements knowing that some of the top people in those areas have tested those papers submitted, and then of course a published paper itself is out to be questioned by the world. I for one would love to believe that reiki worked, think how fu*king amazing it would be if you really could heal someone from a distance. Wow, I love that thought but unfortunately at the moment it doesn't work, it really doesn't. Maybe it will one day but at the moment it doesn't work and that's a fact. I will end this with a quote from Derren Brown's book where his friend Mike (not his real name) was going through a heavily depressed period and his girlfriend convinced him to dispense of his scepticism and let a friend of the couple try some reiki healing on him. This is how he related his experience: "He said he had never felt so abused and exploited in his life. There he was, he said, at his lowest point, being subjected to what he felt was the worst sort of insidiously self-indulgent, ego-driven rubbish. He felt used in the worst way, all to boost what he saw at that moment as the practitioner's co-dependent, dysfunctional sense of self that needed the title 'healer' to feel worthwhile. He likened it, memorably, to the idea of lying in bed as a kid and having an uncle come in and masturbate on him." hug anyone?

uh, which response of Monica's do you admire Tazzi? And do you work in Media and/or Travel? (full stop space comma space)