Welcome to our own easy to use new discussion forum at ddebunked.org - voluntary fact checkers helping you if scared of many things - single click to join from Google, X or FB or join via email
- NOT social media - no age verification
We recently opened up our new dedicated Doomsday Debunked discussion forum just for voluntary fact checking for easily scared people. ddebunked.org You are all welcome to join us there.
I sadly had to stop using our Doomsday Debunked facebook group when Facebook misidentified my fact checks as spam and sadly no longer has human reviewers for appeals. That is the main reaseon that I set up this new forum. However it has turned out to be a positive thing in many ways.
Our facebook group is very active, many posts a day, with lots of voluntary fact checkers to help, but sadly, it excludes many. Some don’t want to be on social media at all. Or they don’t want to do age verification. Or they don’t want to join Facebook.
Also though Facebook does have a good user interface, it’s not custom designed for voluntary fact checking which this new site is. And of course it’s got lots of stuff in the interface that is nothing to do with our group or voluntary fact checking.
This is an entire site just dedicated to what we do. Nothing in the interface except what we want. We can customize it endlessly to our liking in many ways.
I hope this can be a place where all of us can join in. Many have already migrated there, or have a foot in both camps still in Facebook as well as in our new forum.
no age verification
one click join for Facebook, X, and Google (though click to join from Facebook is sometimes glitchy)
It’s not social media, it’s just a forum dedicated to dooomsday debunking
not social media,
only a forum / online chat community
No social feed, no ability to make your own groups, you find nothing there except our own forum for Doomsday Debunked.
It’s a central place we can all post about what we are scared of or help scared people with nothing else to distract.
It’s also a great place for talking privately - FAR BETTER than any social media.
Here is the link again might as well add at the end of each section:
Some of the great features of our new Doomsday Debunked forum
Contents
Uses Flarum - a modern free source, light-weight very extensible forum software
Why I have stopped fact checking on Facebook - my fact checks falsely identified as spam
Posts, replies and private discussions can be as rich in content as a substack, more so actually - and as long as you like
The posts (called topics) can be as rich in content as Substack posts like this one:
Headings and subheadings
table of contents if you want
embedded video
YouTube videos play in the post itself, you don’t have to visit YouTube to see them.
embedded graphics
bullet points etc.
But not only that
posts and replies also are almost unlimited in length, can have as many graphics, videos etc in them as you want and so on.
You could write the entire contents of War and Peace (one of the longer novels in the English Language) in a single post or comment, and still have space to spare. I know because I did that as a test (and then deleted it)
https://ddebunked.org/d/107-test-of-a-long-post-and-replies-alice-in-wonderland-wind-in-the-willows-wizard-of-oz-the-princess-and-the-goblin-the-princess-and-curdie-war-and-peace
In principle you can probably post the entire works of Shakespeare as a single post or comment https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/statistics/Please don’t post anything quite that long - as it would slow down the searches to have so much text to search - adding 4 million letters was enough to incrase the search time from 1.5 seconds to 4 seconds for a query.
but basically your fact checks can be as long as you like, similar to a substack if needs be.
which is great for a fact checker forum
A scared person can ask a simple question and a fact checker can go in as much detail as they like in a post reply with no text limit any amount of graphics video, titles, subtitles etc.
There’s also a solved feature
original poster can mark one of the responses as a solution - which then should highlight it and tell others that their concern has been solved also admins can do that too.
Far better search and far easier to browse - and the public can browse and search freely without joining
This is a great help since many people want to read the fact checks without joining.
And the search in Facebook is really poor. It often doesn’t turn up stuff you know is there.
So this is a big plus.
Our own emoticon set - this is it at present
All designed for positive emotions suitable for a caring forum like ours, none can be used for mocking or sarcasm. Or negative emotions like anger.
Details here:
This may be especially useful for anyone who isn’t sure about reacting in case the emoticons might have a negative effect - they are designed so whichever you use it is always going to be seen as supportive and caring.
The emoticons feature in our new banner
Also in the small logo
no social media distractions: no social feeds, no personal timelines, no ads, no suggested posts, only the forum
admins can edit posts by anyone, so we can add the obligatory “#ddscared” for scared people.
Click to log in with Google, X or Facebook
You can click to log in with Google, X or Facebook - though some people find the log in with Facebook doesn’t work - if stuck let me know e.g. with a comment on this post - or wherever you usually talk to me.
You can also log in via email.
If none of that works just let me know and I can make an account for you on the forum - we can also approve accounts from our side if the email verification doesn’t work.
ddebunked.org/d/59-what-to-do-if-login-via-facebook-doesnt-work
Bumping posts and stickies
Bumping - as for most forums and groups:
if you comment on a post e.g. saying “bump”, it goes to the top of the list of topics
Also if you edit any of the post replies it goes to the top.
Then Flarum has a very useful way of doing “sticikies”
How stickies work
they only stick until you have read them
Often there’s a story that gets repeated as a question over and over in the same day - well we can pin the debunk to it.
The great feature is that members see it pinned but can dismiss it just for them. So then they never see it again that day but everyone else continues to see it pinned.
Right now we have a lot of stickies to help people logging in for the first time and to get used to the site. As soon as you click to read them then they are gone from the list.
Responsive web display- works as well as an app on mobile devices
Though the screenshots here are for laptop - it works just as well from mobile devices
Works for any device bought in the last decade or more
This is the reason I chose Flarum. I’d actually got a forum set up with different software, Discourse. But just on the very day I was about to open it up to everyone to join, I discovered that members with just slightly older versions of the iPhone could only read, not interact or join.
That was useless for us. So I started again with my second choice, Flarum. Which turned out to be much better in many ways :).
You can hide tags you don’t want to see
For instance if you don’t want to see any of the talk about Trump just hide the Trump tag. Some peopel might well post from time to time and not use the tag but we will try to tag all the Trump posts so you can hide them - and others who want to see them can follow them.
You can also hide the ddscared tag - which is a tag to use for stories that scare you that you want help with.
If you hide the ddscared tag you won’t see those stories in the main group but you can still see any particular ddscared post such as your own post or you see them if you specifically search for them.
Private discussions - you can tell where you are because of the distinctive blue shading to paler blue styling and it says “private discussion”
You can post just as you do to the group but start a private discussion. You then select who you want as your recipients and only they can see your post.
The list of recipients is shown at the top of the page. Here I’m trying it out with two versions of myself as ordinary members.
Distinctive pale blue theme for private discussions
Says that it’s private so you always know whether you are in a private or public part of the forum.
With some forum software the admins can see the private discussions but with Flarum they genuinely are private.
You shouldn’t share anything that is very secret - it’s all sored in a MySQL database and so in princiel it can all be read by someone who looked in the database .
However we promise not to do that, not to read the entries there.
Apart from that, there are two situations where your posts become visible to the admins.
Your first post, public or private, must be on topic, keep to our rules, and authorized by the mods or admins
We can see your first post in the forum even if it is private so we can authorize it.
The reason for this is that it turned out to be the best way to filter out nearly all spam and trolling. Their first public post gives them away. We stop a lot of things just by that rule.
Here you can post privately too and the same rule applies.
Your first private post could be a post to us, to support if you don’t want to post publicly but want to talk to us or others privately, just start a private discussion with us about it.
If anyone flags a post even in a private discussion, the mods can see the discussion to moderate it but only for as long as the flag remains
Uses Flarum - a modern free source, light-weight very extensible forum software
It is mature software widely used. It’s free and open source which means that anyone can read the code it uses.
They have many paying customers as well as the free customers like us.
As an example, it’s used by the Swiss national railways SBB for a community forum for its passengers:
We are so glad you are here! Exchange your ideas and connect with other passengers, share your expertise, ask or answer questions! Stay tuned.
https://community.sbb.ch/
SBB hired a company called “Glowing Blue” which did a complete redesign in 2023 based on Flarum instead of their previous commercial solution.
“The SBB Community in a new look. The SBB Community has been completely redeveloped on the basis of the open-source framework Flarum. The new flexible solution will integrate the Community even more closely into the customer experience and gradually add new elements.
SBB in return has been contributing $250 a month back to Flarum, total of just short of $20,000 so far. They have also contributed extensions.
https://opencollective.com/glowingblue_ch
So it is mature software and very customizable.
The way it works is that it is a light weight extendable core. It’s easy to extend, and you need to install lots of extensions for all the features you want.
It’s got a helpful open source community. I plan to add extensios myself as a developer.
You can also style the CSS and add javascript to the interface easily. I’ve been able to do a fair bit of customizing already for things we needed when the extensions didn’t quite give what we wanted.
Why I have stopped fact checking on Facebook - my fact checks falsely identified as spam
It’s about something that at first sight seemed a real blow. I was stopped from doing voluntary fact checking to help scared people on Facebook by an algorithm after 10 years of running our Facebook Group there Doomsday Debunked.
But as you see it has turned out to be really positive in its effects.
This has all happened because Facebook misidentified my fact checks on Facebook as spam - the replies I did to help scared people in the very group that I set up a decade or so ago to help scared people.
I tried really hard for a month to try to get something done about it - but Facebook now only has algoirthms all the way.
During that month I spent one or two days most weeks unable to post or comment to my own group. Not banned. Just telling me not to do whatever I’m doing but nothing in my in box to explain why.
You appeal to one algorithm and only get another algorithm. Also very dumb ones.
If they were chatbots then they would have immediately recognized my comments as fact checks
instead it’s likely just going by thinggs like the time of day / night that I post or comment, how many times I comment, whether the comments have images or links and how often and how many.
As a fact checker I often do
long fact checks with images and with lots of links - and
am often up late at night UK time helping scared people in the Americas and elsewhere in the world
the very dumb algorithm likely falsely identifies that pattern as spam.
You can still talk to me via private messaging on Facebook
I am still on Facebook for private messaging. Facebook has never stopped me from messaging - though it did stop me from accepting new messsage requests.
I don’t know if I can receive new message requests any more. When I can it may be a sign it is beginning to stop misidentifyin me as a spammer.
But from what I’ve read it is safe to go on talking to my existing message contacts. There is no real risk of that being misidentified as spam unless I do obviously spammy things like send the same message to lots of people at once.
The pattern of blocked comments, then a blocked like and post - suggested a likely near future block from Facebook altogether
It got to the point where it seems I was not far from possibly getting a block from Facebook. No actual blocks or bans. Not even a temporary ban.
Just stopped me replying with fact checks 5 times in a month
Then in one day in short succession stopped me from liking someone else’s fact check and stopped me from posting (actually a post about how I was considering moving away from FB for fact checking ironically)
But all of those were without any warning and nothing in my in box, nothing to explain to me what was going on or why, or what could happen next.
This is Facebook’s new approach to spammers. Not to warn them if they risk being blocked. Found many reports from people misidentified as spammers like me, who explain that Facebook can suddenly just block you without warning. Because they don’t want spammers to be able to learn how they detect them as spammers.
So I didn’t want to risk that.
No way to contact a human for an appeal any more
Until recently Facebook had human beings who reviewed our appeals if the algorithms got things wrong. They never talked to us but I was misidentified as a spammer a few years back and the appeals back then worked and I quickly was able to go back to normal fact checking, after a very similar incident.
But it’s clear now that it is algorithsm all the way up - a change they made a year or two ago.
I researched into the paid for Meta Verified, and it does let you talk to a human being. May be useful for some things, but for those who are misidentified as a spammer, they say their experience of Meta Verified is the support say "they agree that you are not a spammer but can’t do anything about it.
So it’s rather pointless so I didn’t try that.
A very long break likely will reset the spam misidentification
The only solution is to wait for a while for it to reset. I waited for 24 hours each time, then for 48 hours but probably I should have waited longer maybe 7 days.
Now it’s got to the point where I likely need a really long break to reset it more than just a week.
I may try commenting again but after 7 warnings I am currently only using Facebook for private mesesages.
When I do start to post / comment maybe later this year or early next, I’ll probably just use Facebook for personal things from now on.
I’d be able to return if Facebook starts to use more sensible algorithms. If it used chatbots to review the appeals they would instantly decide I’m not a spammer.
Anyway will see.
The Facebook group is still continuing but I’m no longer able to moderate effectively or do anything much so I’m leaving it to Stevie-Lee McCarthy who is keeping it going as admin.
Instead I’ll focus on the new forum.
For more on the background:
See:
Likely solution to our Facebook group issues - our own custom community based on D̶i̶s̶c̶o̶u̶r̶s̶e̶ Flarum - NOT another social media app - everything customized as we want and only our own content
UPDATE: Discourse didn’t work because people with older devices such as the lower price iPhones were only able to view it not join or interact. So I went for my second choice Flarum. In final stages of testing and will do a post about it soon.
CONTACT ME VIA PM OR ON FACEBOOK OR EMAIL
You can Direct Message me on Substack - but I check this rarely. Or better, email me at support@robertinventor.com
Or best of all Direct Message me on Facebook if you are okay joining Facebook. My Facebook profile is here:. Robert Walker I usually get Facebook messages much faster than on the other platforms as I spend most of my day there.
FOR MORE HELP
To find a debunk see: List of articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date See also my Short debunks
Scared and want a story debunked? Post to our Facebook group. Please look over the group rules before posting or commenting as they help the group to run smoothly
Facebook group Doomsday Debunked
Also do join our facebook group if you can help with fact checking or to help scared people who are panicking.
SEARCH LIST OF DEBUNKS
You can search by title and there’s also an option to search the content of the blog using a google search. Try different terms e.g. Russia, Putin etc as it only searches the title.
CLICK HERE TO SEARCH: List of articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
NEW SHORT DEBUNKS
I do many more fact checks and debunks on our Facebook group than I could ever write up as blog posts. They are shorter and less polished but there is a good chance you may find a short debunk for some recent concern.
I often write them up as “short debunks”
See Latest short debunks for new short debunks
I also tweet the debunks and short debunks to my Blue Sky page here:
I do the short debunks more often but they are less polished - they are copies of my longer replies to scared people in the Facebook group.
I go through phases when I do lots of short debunks. Recently, I’ve taken to converting comments in the group into posts in the group that resemble short debunks and most of those haven’t yet been copied over to the wiki.
TIPS FOR DEALING WITH DOOMSDAY FEARS
If suicidal or helping someone suicidal see my:
BLOG: Supporting someone who is suicidal
If you have got scared by any of this, health professionals can help. Many of those affected do get help and find it makes a big difference.
They can’t do fact-checking, don’t expect that of them. But they can do a huge amount to help with the panic, anxiety, maladaptive responses to fear and so on.
Also do remember that therapy is not like physical medicine. The only way a therapist can diagnose or indeed treat you is by talking to you and listening to you. If this dialogue isn’t working for whatever reason, do remember you can always ask to change to another therapist and it doesn’t reflect badly on your current therapist to do this.
Also check out my Seven tips for dealing with doomsday fears based on things that help those scared, including a section about ways that health professionals can help you.
I know that sadly many of the people we help can’t access therapy for one reason or another - usually long waiting lists or the costs.
There is much you can do to help yourself. As well as those seven tips, see my:
BLOG: Breathe in and out slowly and deeply and other ways to calm a panic attack
BLOG: Tips from CBT
— might help some of you to deal with doomsday anxieties
PLEASE DON’T COMMENT HERE ON ANY TOPIC EXCEPT THE TOPIC OF THE BLOG POST - INSTEAD COMMENT ON POST SET UP FOR IT
PLEASE DON’T COMMENT ON THIS POST WITH POTENTIALLY SCARY QUESTIONS ABOUT ANY OTHER TOPIC:
INSTEAD PLEASE COMMENT HERE:
Or better, POST TO THE NEW GROUP or start a private discussion with me or with Support on the new group.
The reason is I often can’t respond to comments for some time. The unanswered comment can scare people who come to this post for help on something else
Also even an answered comment may scare them because they see the comment before my reply.
It works much better to put comments on other topics on a special post for them.
It is absolutely fine to digress and go off topic in conversations here.
This is specifically about anything that might scare people on a different topic.
PLEASE DON’T TELL A SCARED PERSON THAT THE THING THEY ARE SCARED OF IS TRUE WITHOUT A VERY RELIABLE SOURCE OR IF YOU ARE A VERY RELIABLE SOURCE YOURSELF - AND RESPOND WITH CARE
This is not like a typical post on substack. It is specifically to help people who are very scared with voluntary fact checking. Please no politically motivated exaggerations here. And please be careful, be aware of the context.
We have a rule in the Facebook group and it is the same here.
If you are scared and need help it is absolutely fine to comment about anything to do with the topic of the post that scares you.
But if you are not scared or don’t want help with my voluntary fact checking please don’t comment with any scary material.
If you respond to scared people here please be careful with your sources. Don’t tell them that something they are scared of is true without excellent reliable sources, or if you are a reliable source yourself.
It also matters a lot exactly HOW you respond. E.g. if someone is in an area with a potential for earthquakes there’s a big difference between a reply that talks about the largest earthquake that’s possible there even when based on reliable sources, and says nothing about how to protect themselves and the same reply with a summary and link to measures to take to protect yourself in an earthquake.
PLEASE DON’T COMMENT HERE ON ANY TOPIC EXCEPT THE TOPIC OF THE BLOG POST - INSTEAD COMMENT ON POST SET UP FOR IT
https://robertinventor.substack.com/p/post-to-comment-on-with-off-topic-940?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
OR BETST - POST TO THE NEW GROUP or start a private discussion with me or with Support on the new group.
https://ddebunked.org
The reason is I often can’t respond to comments for some time. The unanswered comment can scare people who come to this post for help on something else
Also even an answered comment may scare them because they see the comment before my reply.
It works much better to put comments on other topics on a special post for them.
It is absolutely fine to digress and go off topic in conversations here.
This is specifically about anything that might scare people on a different topic.