I should have never allowed myself to be talked out of it in the first place.
The primary reasons are the same as before: Low activity rates, to the extent that genuine discussions are once again being overtaken by spam in terms of volume. This is in spite of substantially increased security measures since then.
But there are also some wider reasons, such my online presence being spread too thin by projects such as the forum. You have to prune these things from time to time. Inspired by the recent events at RIA, I feel it is time for a rationalization and consolidation of my own projects.
The forum will go offline as of the New Year.
THAT SAID, should another forumer or group of forumers wish to continue the forum, I will be happy to turn over the passwords and the forum software license for the common good. The only condition is that I will no longer be liable for the site’s active administration and paying hosting fees. If you are interested, please contact me and we will discuss this further.
Sorry to hear about this, but I saw it coming: who couldn’t have? You were right all along and shouldn’t have heeded the pleas off others not to shut it down.
And what about “The Russian Spectrum”? Is Weiss going to have no competition?
The only thing I regret is the quality comments that are going to be lost along with it. I’ll think of some way to preserve them e.g. by exporting/uploading an xml file with all the forum postings.
The Russian Spectrum has, I admit, gone cold for a lack of prospects and a slowdown in my own attention to it. I haven’t given up on it however and with the reorganization of RIA it might even have more chances now.
I found this at the start of December. So it figures you are closing down the same month… So where do you write?
A pity, but inevitable.
I don’t really see this as indicating a lack of interest in Russia or the related topics. It’s more to do with the trajectory of online debate. Most forums and blogs are struggling or beginning to struggle because the focus has moved to Twitter. That’s sad, because forums and blogs allow for more deliberative contributions.
I sometimes feel that the more debate and discussion is democratised the more more it degenerates.
Before the internet, to make a contribution to a debate, usually through a newspaper, magazine or journal, someone had to present their thoughts in a way that an editor would consider publishable. Then the internet came along and anyone could contribute. Except that, with blogs and forums, to attract people to your site, or to get them to read your post, it usually had to be more or less readable and cogent.
Twitter, by contrast, allows people to just spill their guts, instantly, about any topic. There’s no price whatsoever to offering up your opinion to the masses. You don’t need to know about the topic, you don’t need to be even semi-literate and you don’t need to have something worth saying. It’s enough to have two working fingers and an electronic device.
Some people celebrate the democratisation of debate. To be honest, while I can’t intellectually defend the sentiment, I hate it. I spend my working life and, increasingly, my leisure time, hearing ignorant people sounding off about things that they haven’t even bothered to read up about, much less understand.
The most under-used right in the modern world is the right to shut the fuck up. You don’t know anything about the topic, you’re effectively illiterate, SHUT THE FUCK UP! Nope, now everyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. I wonder are there votes to be had for a ‘Shut the fuck up’ party?
Anyway. Season’s greetings.
Would it be possible to preserve this blog online without having it deleted? I find it a useful reference. Couldn’t it be mirrored for free on blogger or wordpress so that way you don’t have to worry about hosting fees and those who want to access the material here can?
Sooo many things to discussssssss… Euromaidan conspiracy theories and yadda yadda. The olympics haven’t even started, either. I wish I could take charge of it, but I can’t. I hope somebody will. Hey, it’s not New Years yet anyway! 🙁
I have volunteered to take over. Hopefully we’ll get the site running again soon. 🙂
That is really good news! Thanks José!
Good man!
Very glad to hear that! 🙂
Sorry for the delay all. I have unfortunately had a lot of other stuff during the New Year.
I’m on it now though and hopefully the transfer can be completed this weekend and zmoreira can take over as supreme overlord.
Dear Anatoly, thanks for your effort sofar, this blog was my daily mental screensaving (along with other internet sources) and I´ll miss it, would it be possible to have a precise mention of the blog of Moreira? Best – LBazzo
Galata, this blog will continue as it is. What Anatoly is talking about is his other project, the forum Russia Debate, which he will no longer administer and will be taken by José Moreira. The forum is at http://www.russiadebate.com, and of course you are welcome to register and post there also.
After wading through rather unbelievable amount of german mainstream-press reports about Russia which in their one-sidedness I would not have thought was possible, I would have regretted very much if this blog would have stopped to exist. In fact I just found you now. A few funny stories, or not so – just went to my local library to find some scores of Shostakovich, where I stumbled upon a “actual books” bord. 7 books, all sounding like “Putin mad” or “Putin kaputt!?”, the latter being an original title from a famous german publisher (the book is pathetic). Our newspapers are again full of hate against Russia, just forgetting the small things the western world does….and so on. If you go out and ask people on the street about – whatever – pussy riot, Timoshenko, Chodorkovsky….you allways get an utterly uninformed blurb, coming directly from the apps of their i-phones it seems. One-sentence-knowledge, so to speak.
Funny is that I came to this site after reading a very good entry from the blog .”the Kremlin stooge” about Timoshenko (2 years old), and the man mentioned a horrible blog called “larussophobe” (which just goes “a bit”^^ [ha ha] over the top with the same news we listen to in Europe daily, in swedish just like in german mainstream papers. I read, to write a bit too much in a first post, sometimes at a swedish peace movement, and their knowledge about Russia or Timoshenko and so on is – well, hard to believe. Nobody even seems to think about that what we are told can’t be right…It is “good against evil” again. The swedish folks, I am sure, are great people, who just are uninformed. That’s the problem at least in a uniform german and swedish and US mainstream media…
So for once it is not “hey, I found something to learn from” the day the lights go out :-))). All the best to you, and thanks that you don’t delete the old posts, I presume there is much to learn for many here, and I am sure the interest in balanced views about Russia will not fade, quite to the opposite…