A tip of the hat for this remarkable forum!

Stargazer

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Allow me to be slightly off-topic for a tip of the hat to PaulMM.

This topic on McDonnell Douglas F-15 projects is the oldest existing topic on our forum, started on December 28, 2005! The topic was #2 to be created on the forum (#1 no longer exists... it may have been a test topic or merged into another one). The first post in this thread is post #2 of all that was ever posted (out of 285,776 to date!).

Thanks Paul for your passion and your dedication to this forum and making it such a great place to hang around!
 
Skyblazer said:
Allow me to be slightly off-topic for a tip of the hat to PaulMM.

This is the oldest existing topic on our forum, started on December 28, 2005! The topic was #2 to be created on the forum (#1 no longer exists... it may have been a test topic or merged into another one). The first post in this thread is post #2 of all that was ever posted (out of 285,776 to date!).

Thanks Paul for your passion and your dedication to this forum and making it such a great place to hang around!

Hear, hear!
 
Grey Havoc said:
Skyblazer said:
Allow me to be slightly off-topic for a tip of the hat to PaulMM.

This is the oldest existing topic on our forum, started on December 28, 2005! The topic was #2 to be created on the forum (#1 no longer exists... it may have been a test topic or merged into another one). The first post in this thread is post #2 of all that was ever posted (out of 285,776 to date!).

Thanks Paul for your passion and your dedication to this forum and making it such a great place to hang around!

Hear, hear!
This site has to be one of the greatest accumulations of information assembled by private members on the internet. I smiled when I found the site, smiled when I became a member and smile most days by what I find and read here.
 
bobbymike said:
This site has to be one of the greatest accumulations of information assembled by private members on the internet.
Absolutely. This forum is quite an achievement. One of the very best references, thanks to Paul and to the tireless grooming by the moderators.

Congratulations to you all.
 
dan_inbox said:
bobbymike said:
This site has to be one of the greatest accumulations of information assembled by private members on the internet.
Absolutely. This forum is quite an achievement. One of the very best references, thanks to Paul and to the tireless grooming by the moderators.

Congratulations to you all.

I quite agree.
The information accumulated and brought out into the light of day is staggering...in many, many topics the first time info has been brought out into the open. And in many cases I suspect actually saving or preserving info.
 
Could not agree more. Well done, live long and prosper.
 
Hear hear!

This place is one of my reliable daily pleasures - thank you all - especially the founders!
 
Thanks everyone for the kind words. I would never have started writing books if I hadn't started it :)
 
It's a fantastic resource. Many thanks to the moderators and forum members.

* My only concern is that I'm seeing more and more of our discussions being excerpted without attribution by various news and trade publications. *

(Don't know what the official terms of use are and I'd be happy to just modify my signature to say "Please don't steal this" )
 
Indeed it is!

marauder2048 said:
It's a fantastic resource. Many thanks to the moderators and forum members.

marauder2048 said:
* My only concern is that I'm seeing more and more of our discussions being excerpted without attribution by various news and trade publications. *
(Don't know what the official terms of use are and I'd be happy to just modify my signature to say "Please don't steal this" )

That's plagiarism, and a very serious offense for anyone claiming to be professional. Do you have any links?
 
starviking said:
marauder2048 said:
* My only concern is that I'm seeing more and more of our discussions being excerpted without attribution by various news and trade publications. *
(Don't know what the official terms of use are and I'd be happy to just modify my signature to say "Please don't steal this" )

That's plagiarism, and a very serious offense for anyone claiming to be professional. Do you have any links?

Our ever enigmatic member "quellish" was complaining about it as well so I don't feel that I'm totally off base here.

I had complained about it inline on a topic once and got a Private Message encouraging me to take it up with the editor of the publication in question.
The problem with that was the editor of the publication in question wrote the offending piece.

This piece from "The Guardian" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/23/trident-steroid-hp-sauce-nuclear-submarines reads an awful lot like our nearly contemporary "Scotex:What happens to Trident?" topic.

Not to say that the same ideas and analyses can't be independently conceived at the same time..
 
A few journalists have definitely taken stories or images from the forum at various time, but for example Bill Sweetman was always good at giving credit. So long as credit is given, its all good (and this is also why users post should credit their sources).

Quellish is a dedicated researcher with some deep investigative skills, so it wouldn't be surprising if his work sometimes get taken up by the other websites without correct attribution. I don't think that means there's a general trend to be seen here.
 
I've snuck this forum into a source for University a few times (hope that counts as proper attribution). There's simply no other place for a lot of this stuff and it's endlessly fascinating, often where I see things in other places online and I'll do a little digging to find the info, image or word for word excerpt taken from the forum.

I'm a member of a few very good forums on a number of topics, but this has to be one of the genuine best collection of genuinely intensive and generally reliable information on a subject it there. The balance of keeping opinion and debate open as well as discussion sometimes on the fringes of legitimate research without letting the MJ12 crowd take over is a fine and impressive balancing act.
 
I'll chime in on this one, having been a member for a few years. My desire for more information on the SST brought me here. I've found a lot of new interests on the way, and have a great time seeing what's going on.
 
Two thumbs up, the best site of its kind, very good moderators and highly educated, multinational, nice, knowledgable people! Fun to visit and look around.
 
One of the great things about this site is the mingling of different interests and expertise from contributors.
Many of the threads contain more information than books on the subject.
Thanks to Paul and all moderators for making sense of this and keeping it going.
Perhaps any contributions to threads here could be automatically regarded as articles in an online Janes equivalent called Secret Projects Forum. Journalists and others could then be told to attribute the site as their source just as they would a publication.
 
There can be no doubt that the excellent moderation is what makes this forum so special. There are few places on the Internet where time-served professionals and young enthusiasts can share a sense of common community and work together to produce something so special. As Rudyard Kipling wrote,
"All England is a garden, and gardens are not made
By saying 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade."
Long may Paul remain our Head Gardener.
 
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I am concerned that all this treasure of information and knowledge will be lost if one day the forum ceases its activity, speaking seriously I believe it is part of the heritage of humanity
I'm with you Justo. Here I have learn about how many knowledge, from companies and institutions, has been lost forever and what happens when key people with great knowledge and huge personal archives passed away. Sharing knowledge in internet is already contributing to reverse this historical tendency in webs like the fora or Wikipedia. New generations of professionals and enthusiasts can "pick up the baton" (not quite sure about that google translation from my native Spanish :) ). My hope is that future AI could do what's beyond humans: to scan the net for knowledge and of classify it all in a sort of encyclopedia on steroids. We, human kind never were so close to keep all our knowledge available and safe from losses. I hope secretprojects.co.uk treasure of knowledge could be safe until that moment.
 
May this Keep (SP) of knowledge live long so all men can prosper in the future. We individuals are but fragile vessels, of limited shelf-life -- a constant head-ache to the Great archivist in the sky. Maybe we should have stuck with stone tablets -- more stable than flitting bits of on/off electricity.
 
I've been reading this forum for more than a decade I think, it's fantastic. Only been a member for a year or two though, mainly because KP messed up badly.

I do wonder why the casual thread me and user @TR1 wrote in was deleted from out of nowhere though. Would really love to hear a motivation. Sure, as a mere user I and others are at the moderator's mercy and that's it, but a tiny sliver of information shouldn't be too much to ask for?
 
Seconded that I've read some amazing information dating back years on this forum, specially valuable to a merely casual fan of aviation such as myself.

I suspect moderators are extra vigilant in keeping any (potentially) hot political discussion from dirtying the forum up.

Which honestly is fair policy, just should be consistently applied. I guess it is part on users to refrain from snarky political remarks as well....
No offense to some users but some threads (Nuclear modernization in particular) are legit echo chambers of one sided political grievance.
 
I was nice and sent you $50 just now. It helps when you're a millionaire... ;)
 
I do tip my hat to this remarkable forum. It has provided me with a much more broad "situational awareness" on numerous topics than what I would have been able to acquire on my own, over time. It's almost like crowd sourcing, but for aerospace history items, etc.
 

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