Hi all,

I'm posting this to seek input on felicifia.com. As far as I can tell, the site is now unused except for some spammers who register accounts and sometimes put up posts to link to unrelated websites trying to sell things. Given this, my inclination is to try downloading the site so there's an archive of the posts and then take the site down. I'd be fine with leaving an archive online but only if the spam issue is gone. I see no reason to keep it active given that the legitimate traffic is now all over here.

If you have suggestions on effective archiving schemes, please let me know. Otherwise I'll see what I can come up with.

Or, if you have other suggestions for what to do with the site, I'm interested in that too.

Thanks,
Seth

Your plan sounds like a good one. The site will probably never be used again, since as you say, all traffic is now over here. I would like to preserve the content, because a lot of it is really good. If there were a way to preserve existing hyperlinks to avoid breaking the (several) references that I and others have made to discussions there, that would be awesome, but as long as the archive remains accessible (and hopefully web-searchable), that should be adequate.

Thanks for taking initiative to do this, BTW!

Agree with everything Alan says. If we do try to create a Felicifia journal/zine (see my response to your intro thread), perhaps it would be possible to combine it with the archive?

Hi all,
journal
Arepo, the creation of an open-access journal sounds a daunting task. Although I understand we're both on the outside of the academic world, we would both understand something about it, right? Pressure to publish is one of its nastiest features. If you publish in the most selective journal, it that delivers you prestige and causes your article to be more widely read and, in turn, cited. You would certainly want the views of many academics before embarking on such a project.

wikis
I would be attracted to the possibility of fusing the existing reducing suffering wiki with a utilitarianism wiki. I think the combination of applied ethics with its theoretical underpinnings could strengthen both. For example, you would go to the utilitarianism page and see "approaches to reducing suffering: one approach to reducing suffering the most is by targeting those individuals who are most marginalised such as poor humans, wild animals etc." I recognise that not all anti-speciesists are utilitarians, or the reverse, but I'd be confident the wiki could be made inclusive yet coherent.

I know that some of felicifia.com & felicifia.org's posts would be of use to such a wiki. I'm not sure if it would be in the wiki's interest
> index and link to them,
> copy them verbatim,
> edit and condense them
or take any other alternative.

felicifia.com
Seth, I'm surprised at the idea of taking felicifia.com down soon. Sure, inevitably, it'll eventually have to be go offline. I think it should stay online at least in the short-term. Otherwise its valuable info would be lost. If it was kept online for some time, we could take the good bits and put them somewhere else.

RyanCarey wrote:I would be attracted to the possibility of fusing the existing reducing suffering wiki with a utilitarianism wiki. I think the combination of applied ethics with its theoretical underpinnings could strengthen both. For example, you would go to the utilitarianism page and see "approaches to reducing suffering: one approach to reducing suffering the most is by targeting those individuals who are most marginalised such as poor humans, wild animals etc."

Sure, I think that sounds like a great idea, especially since the Reducing-Suffering Wiki is just in its infancy. I think the best way to combine it with this site would be through hyperlinks and occasional summaries of posts on the wiki pages; it's needless effort to copy and paste text verbatim, and that destroys the rapid editability that is the hallmark of wikis and forum posts. I think the Less Wrong Wiki is a great model -- see, for instance, this article on philosophical zombies.

Feel free to modify / add to / rework the Reducing-Suffering Wiki in ways that you think will allow it to merge with Felicifia. Or feel free to suggest how others might do this. But I agree that it would be great to keep the two actively combined, rather than trying to create two separate communities for much the same sorts of work.

Thanks for the comments.

I'm now looking into how to properly archive felicifia.com. I agree with keeping an archive of it online, ideally with the original url's. Let's see what we can do.

I think an independent online journal would be a difficult venture. There already are a lot of journals covering many aspects of utilitarianism, both theoretical and applied. I personally have no shortage of outlets that could publish what I might want to write on. I also shy away from new journals, because they have smaller audiences and are less likely to have an enduring presence. For a new journal to be attractive, it needs to fill a sizable gap in the existing literature and have a significant group of people ready to write for and read it. I don't see that here.

A better idea may be to try partnering with Utilitas. They publish mostly philosophical articles but they have at least somewhat of an interdisciplinary bent. They're published via Cambridge UP which makes the final versions subscription-only, but perhaps non-final preprint versions could be systematically put online. Also maybe they would consider (co-)sponsoring a more interdisciplinary, applied, open-access journal written for a broader audience. A model to consider along these lines is http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com.

Hi all,
Quick update on felicifia.com:
- Dave Pearce/Knightsbridge arranged an offline archive of all the content, so one way or another, the conversations won't be lost forever. Dave and I both have copies of this.
- I arranged to end the contract with SoapBlox, so at some point the site might cease to function, though right now it looks normal.
- As the blog platform gets phased out, we'll continue to send community traffic here. We'll also have the opportunity to decide if we want to do anything different with felicifia.com. Suggestions are always welcome, but for now there's no need to change anything unless there's something people are interested in implementing now.
-Seth

One more quick update: felicifia.com is now down, but at least some of the old pages are available via the internet archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://felicifia.com
We have our own archive of the site and will get that up eventually. Let me know if you'd like to assist in that process.