meta » Banned Atheist's Network

Welcome to The B.A.N., quietmarc!

And thank you for breaking the ice and moving your Zombunist blog here. This marks a new chapter for this baby blog network, started over the summer of 2012. Up until now, most of the original content has come from one source — me. I’m only one voice, though — one perspective in a real big world.

From the beginning, The B.A.N. was intended to offer online publishing opportunities to the ‘accidental atheist’ — not just as a cure for the online banning of a few of us. I hoped to provide a combination platform and safe-space for voices that even might get banned. “An ounce of prevention,” and all that. I’ve never thought that an atheist’s blog must be all about atheism. We’re whole people — lack of godbelief is just one usually small part of who we are.

For my part, I promise to renew my outreach efforts to draw attention to the bloggers, small but growing community, and the issues we care about. Over the summer it drew up to 32,000 views a day, and that’s nothing to sneeze at — The BAN was just a month or so old, then.

Some recent upgrades to the backend software running the B.A.N. has disabled certain site features. I’m working on the problem, but it looks like I’ll have to just wait until an upgrade is released for one particular component. The component’s author is aware of the bug and is working on a fix. I figure a week or two and we’ll have these features back.

A list of affected features and my workarounds (I will update it if I find more bugs):

‘Join Group’ buttons broken: so now every member will be added to every existing group upon registration.
‘Friend Member’ buttons broken: so I turned the ‘Friends’ feature off for the time being.
‘Send Reply’ buttons broken: in Private Messages, replies are not sent. Members will have to ‘Compose New’ message instead of replying for the time being.

So The B.A.N. hit a landmark today: we topped 10,000 views to the site. Not bad for being just over a month old, eh? I’m not mad about it, that’s for sure! Here’s my proof, just because I’m stoked:

In case anyone’s interested, the vast majority of those views were thanks to good meme posting skills at r/atheism on Reddit. A different meme brought more than 75% of views each day, respectively. Heheh.

The B.A.N. is now a blog network, not just a blog site with built-in social net.

What does this mean? Truthfully: not much at this point, but I’m an optimist! As The B.A.N.’s user base grows (this site is not even a month old) I expect to discover some talented bloggers looking for a home (or a move), and I intend to offer them one here.

Technologically, it means that The B.A.N. is now running the identical network that FreethoughtBlogs.com uses — the WordPress multisite network (nee, WPMU). For instance, when you go to JT’s blog at FtB, you go to the address FreethoughtBlogs.com/wwjtd — and that’s JT’s dedicated blog, which he can control from the back-end admin. Similarly, if JT decided to switch to The B.A.N. (yeah, I know…) his blog would be at wwjtd.BannedAtheists.us. If you, Dear Reader, decided to start (or move) a blog here, it would be at DearReader.BannedAtheists.us.

The technological differences from FtB are worth noting, too. The B.A.N. is also running a custom instance of BuddyPress social to include readers in the creative process, giving folks a chance to participate in ways other than commenting on blog posts. Not many have taken advantage of all the features the ‘Community’ tab offers, yet, but again this site is still very new and I’ve spent more time tinkering than pimping. You can utilize group forums and group wikis, but also use your account to as a personal photobucket, organize links, send PM’s to other members of the network.

Now, you can even request to have your own blog site in the network. First let me make it foolproof, then I’ll roll out a blog request form.

(BTW, “Site News” has now changed to “B.A.N. News” to include all sites in the network.)

Enjoy!

Joseph Edwards VIII, Sysop

It’s been a rough summer, and I was busily escaping from my real life misadventures in Missouri farm life by lurking in the DU forums when I was rudely banned. Needing something creative to do, I started plugging away at this site. It’s not like I had a concrete goal in mind. I just needed a project I could sink my teeth into, that would also let me vent my spleen when needed. Isn’t that what blogs are for?

This isn’t my first web site, nor my first blog. I’m a web developer/designer my trade, with a long background in print media. It’s just my first atheist blog slash news site, and it turns out to be kind of tricky to do this right. I read other atheist blogs, and most of the more widely read ones are collections of aimless posts loaded with personal color: A cat pic. Some meta angst about an upcoming conference. Hate mail. Etc…

Not that all atheist blogs are like this. Many decidedly aren’t — it just seems like the popular ones are, and, hey! I’m a writer! We want to be read. It hasn’t come easy. As a writer, I’m verbose. Twitter makes me mad, and puffery just annoys me, so I won’t be writing any.

But I knew I needed a hook of some sort — something to cover up that new blog smell. That’s when I remembered: Oh yeah! I’m a cartoonist!

I dug up some old toons (my Tractoon) to post, and that’s got me cartooning, again. And I do like to draw. It took a long time to learn how, but now that I know, I find it relaxing. I can think about other things, watch movies, or talk to people and draw at the same time. I can’t write a computer program or a mathematical proof and multitask. It feels natural to doodle. It’s more than a distraction or escape — it’s me; it’s integral to my character.

It’s also been beneficial to my hit stats. Check it out – zero to putt-putt in a couple weeks:

Most of that growth has been thanks to my toons — I’ve been posting them on r/atheism, Twitter and elsewhere on a daily basis. Not all of the views are pointed at web comics, though. I noticed this on yesterday’s referrer stats:

Heheh… DU’s sending traffic here. Hur hur. Cool. I couldn’t resist, of course, and clicked through to see which DUer I needed to thank, and in what context. Here’s the relevant subthread:

EvolveOrConvolve (4,564 posts)
17. One of the “biggest trolls to hit DU”
LOL, really? Who might that be?
Stop doing ugly things and we’ll stop pointing those ugly things out.

cbayer (109,021 posts)
19. Mark Charles, samg, etc.
You ought to keep your eye out for him.
He is a master and gets your group every time.

rug (38,743 posts)
21. He’s over here.
http://bannedatheists.us/
Democratic Underground is listed as a “playground”.

Oh, oh, oh!… Irony, you are a delicious treat. Thank you, ‘Rug,’ for sending some traffic this way. Also, ‘cbayer’, I’m delighted to know that I am a “master” and one of the “biggest trolls to hit DU”. That’s just awesome; though I can’t take credit for Mark Charles or samg, et al. Maybe banned atheists wouldn’t act so vengeful if DU didn’t give Christian bigot trolls a free pass, day after fucking day. Rug. CB. 8|

When ‘laconicsax’ got PPR’d, it was Rug who baited him. When I got the pizza, it was Rug, the Teflon Troll. I said elsewhere, and I’ll say it again: I’ll hand it to you, Rug, you win. I can no longer respond to any falsehoods in the Religion forum, that’s true. Now I have this here BFE web site, and here I can call Rug what he is — a barely disguised bigot and a serial-alerting troll — and MIRT can kiss my POS TOS.

The third DU link in the screen grab is just Rug’s post alone (not in-thread). The second DU link is to a post I wrote under the one-off ‘bassthump’ zombie a couple days after I was PPR’d. It was and will be my last zombie at DU. (This is far more fulfilling.) For the record, my sockmonkey army never existed. The only accounts I’ve had at DU under which I posted anything (IP logging gave me a couple false starts coming back as a zombie) have been ‘joseph8th’ (a bunch), ‘daaron’ (some), and ‘bassthump’ (one).

What’s more, I have no idea who else on DU is a zombie or sockmonkey. Could be anyone. Are ‘Starboard Tack’ (‘Right Leaning’?) and ‘cbayer’ really the same person? Is Rug being paid by the Vatican? We ask; you decide.

(Was that rambling enough for you, atheoblogosphere?)

Now each group’s creator and/or admin(s) can control the appearance of a ‘Group Front Page’ to replace the deprecated ‘Activity’ feeds on this site. Given only group ‘create’ info, a basic group profile will be displayed. Edit the group ‘admin’ settings, and you can pimp your group’s splash page.

Have at ‘em, mateys!

Say goodbye to BP ‘Activity’ streams on this site. Unless there’s an outcry (from whom, I ask) it seems superfluous next to the Groups/Forums structure we probably want here.

Plus they were confusing as hell. I’ll try to whip up some sort of Group landing page to prettify them. Other than that we’re back to good old forums and wiki docs.

This site started out of revenge; you know that, right? Sure, it’s just a blog — my blog, to be specific — but it’s a Revenge Blog with Bells & Whistles for Other People.

I was banned (unfairly in my mind) from DemocraticUnderground.com about six months ago for attacking a bigoted Catholic troll by calling him the names “bigot” and “troll”. In my mind, the admins who booted me that day treated my verbal opponent with undue deference and I started wondering: are atheists being treated differently than believers on this or other progressive websites?

To find out, I came back as a zombie, at first pretending to be a liberal Christian with agnostic tendencies, and I was well-received. It was not until months later, after my virtual ‘coming out’ as an atheist, that I began to attract negative attention from some of the True Believers. It was that negative feedback — the alerts and meta-whining — that drew the admin’s attention to my account. Once they figured out that I was a “repeat disruptor” it was all over, whether they were in the right for banning me in the first place, or not.

No appeal — just like the rest of corporate America: “Talk to management.”

That same True Believer troll lives on; and though other atheists on DU have fallen to his tempting bait before and after me, to him — my internet nemesis — I doff my cap and say, “You have won this round. But we non-believers may win the event. Without you, oh baiter of my banning, I would have had no reason to blog.”

For all you news hounds like me out there… I concocted an all-in-one atheism-related news feed aggregation page. Check it out here, or you can get to it from anywhere by using the ‘Top Tens’ link in the main menu under ‘News’. This way you can see the stories as they hit the ticker. Dig it.

Each block displays the latest 10 posts on the RSS feed for various news, forums and social networking sites. Click on the title of the feed to change the display. Click on any post title to see the original. Whee!

New Blog: Zombunist

Technical Difficulties

Landmark: >10,000 Views in a Day

New Feature: BLOGS!!!

Meta-Me on Blogging, Cartooning, and a Liberal Christian Troll Called ‘Rug’

New Feature: Group front pages

Clean Up: No more ‘Activity’ streams

Meta-Me and The B.A.N.

New Feature: ‘Top Tens’ page