Upon returning to Christian Forums’ creationism vs. evolution board after a hiatus of around ten months, I’ve noticed that it has a new webmaster again. This was the second time they’ve changed webmasters in the same number of years.

In October of 2007, after running CF for six years, its creator Erwin Loh was replaced by someone named Lee Dodd. I didn’t approve of most of the changes that LeeD made to Erwin’s policies for the forum, but at least LeeD knew what he was doing from a technological standpoint, being the owner of an internet media company. But its newest webmaster, Pauler, doesn’t even have that to his benefit. When he replaced LeeD in this position, on January 22nd of 2009, he had been registered at CF for less than 24 hours. As of this month, CF’s current webmaster has been a member there for less than 1/7th as long as I have.

Actions speak louder that descriptions, so for the sake of comparison, here’s a typical announcement from Pauler, and one from Erwin. A couple of notable differences worth pointing out:

1: Pauler doesn’t know how to program the site himself, hence having to hire other programmers to help deal with the hacking attack against CF that was mentioned there. Since the programmer that Pauler hired wasn’t familiar with all of CF’s modifications to the VBulletin software, they had a lot of trouble installing the upgrade to this software and making it work. This is in contrast to Erwin, who programmed most of these modifications himself, and has also shared them with the wider VBulletin community, as mentioned here. Since Erwin was the creator of these mods, why didn’t Pauler ask just him to handle the upgrade, rather than hiring a programmer who had no experience with CF? I don’t know the answer for certain, but my money’s on Pauler being such a newbie that he didn’t even think of this.

2: Erwin has a total of 37,516 posts at CF, while Pauler has a total of 172. The fact that Pauler has only been registered for nine months, compared to Erwin’s eight years, can’t completely account for this difference. If they both were posting at the same rate during the time they’d been registered, Erwin would have a little more than 10 times as many posts as Pauler, while in fact he has more than two hundred times as many. The reason for this difference also explains Erwin’s ability to post announcements such as the one I linked to about WinAce—unlike Pauler, Erwin was actively engaged in his community, and as a result was able to notice things like when one of its members was dying and needed his help.

3: Erwin knew how to use proper grammar and capitalization. I can tolerate it when other members of a forum aren’t able to do this, but someone who’s posting announcements for a 36,000 member community should be willing to put forth the small amount of additional effort it takes for that.

Even beyond anything that can be seen from a pair of individual announcement threads, though, is something that I’ve gradually become aware of during the three and three quarters years that I was posting at CF while Erwin was in charge there. Unlike Pauler, Erwin was a perfect example of the sort of Christian whom I’m able to respect, despite my disagreements with Christianity. Education and intelligence is one factor—in addition to being an active contributor to VBulletin’s developer community, Erwin was a practicing lawyer and medical doctor, having graduated both medical school and law school. And more importantly, his view on how to make Christianity more popular was not based on advertising it, or enforcing any particular set of doctrine. His goal with CF was the create a Christian-run community that would be beneficial to members of all religions, including non-religious people such as myself, and thus show the rest of the world the good that Christians can accomplish without imposing their beliefs on anyone else.

Cutting back on Erwin’s policy of tolerance was one of the first changes that LeeD made after he was given control of the forum. The biggest example of this was the closing of General Apologetics, a section of the forum where non-Christians could ask questions about Christianity, due to the fact that non-Christians were winning too many arguments there. Based on what I’ve seen from Pauler so far, I doubt he’ll be changing this. Actually, I doubt he’ll be changing anything—he seems only barely able to maintain the forum as it is, let alone adding anything new.

As someone who’s been the webmaster of several forums, I have a fairly good understanding of the sort of skill and dedication that it takes to run one properly. With this in mind, I consider Erwin Loh to have been the best webmaster I’ve had at any forum where I’ve ever posted. LeeD and Pauler aren’t the worst—that distinction belongs to either Drach or Shoesie—but they’re certainly below-average. I’ve wondered a few times whether it would be worth creating a petition at CF to put Erwin back in charge there. I suspect I’d be able to get quite a bit of support for this idea, but considering how little attention Pauler pays to his community, if I were to create such a petition he’d probably just ignore it.