I am also pleased to announce that our new site is 'up' although we are still in the process of copying over the relevant articles from this site. The domain forwarding has been updated, and within 24 hours or so, all queries for 2012hoax.org will redirect to cosmophobia.org. Our new forum site is also up, running on a phpBB3 forum hosted by Artelis

Please visit our new home at http://www.cosmophobia.org and our new forum site at http://www.cosmophobia.artelis.co.uk/

We also have a new Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/cosmophobia

1st of all, I would like anyone interested in being an admin on the new site to drop me a note at gro.xaoh2102|nimda#gro.xaoh2102|nimda (or gro.aibohpomsoc|nimda#gro.aibohpomsoc|nimda) with your wikidot id and email address. Anyone currently an admin or mod of this site is invited automatically, but I don't have all of your email addresses. Anyone interested in joining the site as a member and steering the future direction of the site is also invited. What I would like to do is start a semi-private conversation with you on a google group to discuss the future of the website (or websites).

In my mind there are several questions that need to be answered:

1) One new site, or multiple sites? I'm considering some advice I was given by a few people active in the science education community (specifically Ian O'Neill and Tony Darnell) regarding the future of the 2012hoax.org site and how we handle future doomsday hoaxes.
2) Direction of the new site. Specifically how 'in your face' are we going to get with various doom-mongers heading down the road. This is related to #1 above, in that we can have a 'kinder & gentler' education site under the 'Cosmophobia' banner and a more aggressive site under a different domain name.
3) Platform: I like the current platform for the main site (but I'm not married to it). I am not it so much as a forum platform. I would like to discuss everybody's feelings about this, and gather suggestions as to what we should do in this area.
4) Migration: Related to #3 above, if we stay on the current platform, the migration will be a lot easier. I would prefer to work out a way to leave the existing site untouched, and copy the relevant articles to another site or sites.
5) Roles: we have not had an organized system so far. This has served us well enough in the past, but we should talk about whether that will serve us well enough moving forward, and what kinds of roles people are interested in pursuing).

I would like to have the skeleton of the new site in place by the first of the year, so I'm looking forward to hearing from you soon.

I plan on taking a few days off from here. Not that I don't like you guys, but I have put a lot of time in here, and I just want a few days off.

After Christmas, I will be announcing a new site. This one is great, but it is already somewhat dated. :-) The new site will be debunking more doomsday and pseudoscience, but it will not be tied to a specific year. 2012hoax.org will redirect people to the new site, and I hope that several of the "crew" here will stick around to be a part of the new site.

More to follow after Christmas.

Thanks to http://www.jacamo.co.uk/ for putting this together for http://www.blokely.com/

I note the regrettable tendency of the news coverage to give me (Bill Hudson a.k.a. Astrogeek) the lion's share of the credit (if not all of it) for setting up this site. Let me reiterate for anyone unfamiliar with the history of this site: I am a relative late-comer to the group of people who founded this site. I'm just the tech-head who set up the domain and the site. I'm also a pretty fast typist which helped me to crank out a lot of the articles, but the content of those articles belongs in large part to the original group. In particular bikenbeer2000, ticktock, and Alene Y, among a group of others. However, I think that gets edited out of the coverage even though I discussed it with the reporter (The Toronto Star article is the only one in this list that I collaborated on, the other stories apparently jumped off from the Wall Street Journal coverage).

bikenbeer2000

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323981504578177310846524542.html?KEYWORDS=mayan+calendar

Seeing as how this site's traffic has increased nearly 7-fold in the space of a few weeks, and we are now seeing over 600 forum posts per day, the administrators simply don't have time to deal with nonsense politely any more. If you 'troll' the forums by posting content that mocks or denigrates another user based on their stated fears, or if you admit to 'trolling', then you will simply be banned from posting.

Please take the time to read the rules and make sure you are following them.

December 11th: 18,998 visits, 17,222 unique visitors.

Top 10 Traffic Sources:

The cover story of the December 7th issue is: "What, Me worry? 6 other views of doomsday".

Here is an excerpt from the 'teaser' section:

… what does the cool, calm, rational voice of science say about our impending demise?

“Bull. It’s all bull,” says astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, head of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York.

“Crazy. People always worry about the wrong things,” says MIT physicist Max Tegmark, who studies ways the universe could really end — in billions of years.

“The end of the world isn’t something the Maya made prophecies about,” declares Maya expert David Stuart, author of The Order of Days: The Maya World and the Truth About 2012.

Also featured is some commentary by William Saturno of Boston University

It's a good overview of the objections to some of the basic claims, and I'm hopeful with those kinds of circulation numbers, that it will get into the hands of some people that need reassuring.

As it turns out, Michael Shermer from Skeptic magazine and the Skeptics Society wrote an article in New Scientist magazine in June 2011 titled "The end is always nigh in the human mind". It is definitely worth a read.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf2sYzbn3pA&feature=youtu.be

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/11/27/mayan_apocalypse_magazine_promotes_doomsday_nonsense.html