The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry » Forum: Special Announcement from Stephen Fry

The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry » Forum: Special Announcement from Stephen Fry - Recent Posts http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/forum/special-announcement Just another bbPress community en-US Wed, 22 May 2013 19:47:10 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 <![CDATA[Search]]> q http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/search.php TobiasMonk on "Moderator needed!!" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/moderator-needed#post-292931 Tue, 07 May 2013 01:16:33 +0000 TobiasMonk 292931@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ We volunteer our time, and deal with the spam as we see it. Kitty4 on "Moderator needed!!" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/moderator-needed#post-292929 Mon, 06 May 2013 23:55:26 +0000 Kitty4 292929@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ Hi, I just joined yesterday but see so many posts that are spam or advertising here which is off putting:( I moderate three sites and we wouldn't have this at all, can I suggest you get a mod on board that will work weekends ???? Kitty4 ruthb on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/13#post-287563 Mon, 17 Sep 2012 19:40:10 +0000 ruthb 287563@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ I've just joined the forum and already see lots of the things I love being mentioned by members - CSI, Dinner Ladies, Meerkats and more - so I know it's a good place to be! I stumbled upon this site via a remarkably circuitous route - I googled an old college friend's name as we've lost touch and I was going to look her up, and lo and behold, there she was, mentioned in a members memoirs, posted on this site! I was so interested, that I've postponed my search for now, but will keep you all posted as to whether we get in touch. And I shall, naturally, never mention that her family and neighbours are the subjects of an online blog! Anyway, that's all for now, looking forward to getting to know folk and sharing our views. <img src="http://www.stephenfry.com/bb-content/plugins//bb-smilies/default/icon_smile.gif" title=":-)" class="bb_smilies" /> <img src="http://www.stephenfry.com/bb-content/plugins//bb-smilies/default/icon_smile.gif" title=":-)" class="bb_smilies" /> samuelh73 on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-286461 Thu, 16 Aug 2012 05:23:13 +0000 samuelh73 286461@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ I, too, am a new member, and I am certainly glad to see Mr. Fry, etc. are trying their best to keep us in the loop. A hearty cheers to Mr. Fry and the moderators for trying their best to make things right. However.... Considering this is a free service (unless there is a hidden VIP room no one told me about), I think I can easily overlook the technical issues which may be present. Being new to this forum I cannot vouch for the emotional issues to which Mr. Fry attests, but I am certain such issues arose with the best intentions at heart (and we all know what the road to Hell is infamously paved with). From the few posts I have read on this thread it appears everyone similarly feels as Mr. Fry does as they attempt to absolve their possible transgressions, and I am greatly pleased by that. Carry on, Mr. Fry and Co...I shall remain. 1so-Static on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-286283 Sun, 12 Aug 2012 18:14:28 +0000 1so-Static 286283@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ Hi - I'm new here and reading this I solemnly promise not to affront, aggravate or otherwise infuriate the awesome Fry and/or his fellow techno-apostles <img src="http://www.stephenfry.com/bb-content/plugins//bb-smilies/default/icon_wink.gif" title=":wink:" class="bb_smilies" /> EmEdv on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-285807 Sun, 22 Jul 2012 00:07:59 +0000 EmEdv 285807@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ Hi, I'm Emelie. I'm 19. I'm new to this forum but I just want to express my sincere gratitude for creating a place like this. I've long scanned the web for a forum in which I can truly learn and discuss without reading hateful words or cursing of others. This seems like a genuinly open-minded and devoted community. I am thrilled to have become part of it. Even better is that it's part of StephenFry.com as I am an admirer of his (yours, if you happen to read this) work. Yes, I'd even go as far as calling Stephen Fry my absolute hero and rolemodel in life. Thank you. Lots of love to everyone that happens to read this. Andie51 on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-285799 Sat, 21 Jul 2012 15:21:31 +0000 Andie51 285799@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ Hi Stephen, It's my first day I would just like to say ... I love you and everything your doing for mental health. I was diagnosed with manic depression in 2007 and have been hospitalised 4 times for months at a time, self harm was also a major problem until last year. you are an inspiration to many, keep up the good work xxx Jessica M. on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-285641 Fri, 13 Jul 2012 21:56:09 +0000 Jessica M. 285641@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ I'm also new, and haven't noticed any friction, but I do want to express my own gratitude for a place like this. I deal with depression on a daily basis, and Stephen's work has cheered me immensely these past few weeks because I've been having a rough time... Cheers from the US, Jessica (@rainflowermoon on twitter) <blockquote><cite>Eigernordwand <a href="//www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry#post-194113"">said</a>:</cite> There's been friction <img src="http://www.stephenfry.com/bb-content/plugins//bb-smilies/default/icon_eek.gif" title="8O" class="bb_smilies" /> ?? Well I hope it's soon sorted, this is a nice warm place to be, an escape at times from the coolness of the outside world <img src="http://www.stephenfry.com/bb-content/plugins//bb-smilies/default/icon_cool.gif" title="8)" class="bb_smilies" /> I'm just a newbie so may be I haven't been around long enough to notice friction <img src="http://www.stephenfry.com/bb-content/plugins//bb-smilies/default/icon_mrgreen.gif" title=":mrgreen:" class="bb_smilies" /> </blockquote> rockabillybelle on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-284053 Tue, 08 May 2012 04:14:09 +0000 rockabillybelle 284053@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ This is my first time on this site, which in part is due to my own stupidity, you see the reason I found it is that I was very moved by something I heard in Stephen's speech at the Baftas and wanted to contact him to let him know how I agreed with it and how he had helped me. I have terrible insomnia and annoy my family and loved ones by having the television on 24/7, I enjoy being on my own on every now and then- just like others- and I enjoy the peacefulness of darkness, but I cannot abide silence! it makes me restless during the day and bedtime is therefore an obvious nightmare. When it's quiet my mind races a million miles a second and all these weird and not so wonderful thoughts appear. I am not crazy, yet in the wee small hours I find myself struck with guilt remembering some awful thing I said to a friend aged 13, or some time I drunkenly caused a scene as a teenager or even the white lie I told a stranger last week to impress them- so I leave the tv on. contrary to keeping me awake it aides me in getting the three hours insomnia sometimes allows me before I have to getup for work again. during the day tv is mere background noise as I go about my business, when it's quiet as I work or do whatever, my surroundings intensify and I get anxious that I'm not doing things quickly or well enough. At night when there are no people,no tasks and no distractions from the chore of waiting to fall asleep tv becomes my focus. But lately I have found a helping hand in Mr Fry who I now go to bed with every night <img src="http://www.stephenfry.com/bb-content/plugins//bb-smilies/default/icon_lol.gif" title=":lol:" class="bb_smilies" /> . I enjoy QI alot, it is a program my friends and I can indulge in while consoling our brains we are learning something new all the time <img src="http://www.stephenfry.com/bb-content/plugins//bb-smilies/default/icon_lol.gif" title=":lol:" class="bb_smilies" /> I also enjoy Stephen's voice immensely. I began watching videos of his lectures on youtube on my laptop everynight. and it is in his speech at the Baftas that he said that tv was no longer the fireplace of a home, that it had become the central heating of a home, an ever present pleasant ambience. That is exactly the role tv plays in my home and im grateful to say that it no longer features in my nights. I have found podcasts, videos etc of stephen's lectures and musings instead, it's like i'm being read a bed time story, I have more interesting things to talk about and consider during the day, things he has talked about has made me curious to go and investigate these subjects for myself and he also has a very good way of putting both sides of any argument across when stating his opinion that has changed a few(not all of course) of the views that I ignorantly held before. my final point, whither he will find this as compliment or not, is that my nights are now more peaceful and I am sleeping better than I have in years, having found this site I now have his audio blogs to listen to Thank you Mr Fry for helping me both with my own neurosis and my sleeping patterns. Karunasiddhi on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-283311 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 21:08:32 +0000 Karunasiddhi 283311@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ Dear Stephen For a recently updated site, I think Andrew Sampson is doing a marvellous job. Would it not help him if a Forum topic was set up to collect website bug reports from the fan base? Namaste, Karunasiddhi KarenW.E. on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-283121 Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:30:06 +0000 KarenW.E. 283121@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ Dear Stephen, OK, first I want to tell you how we have admired you (loved you even….) since the earliest days Of Fry and Laurie, thru Jeeves and Wooster, even BlackAdder and anything/everything we could find you in…between. But we fell in love all over again and got so very hooked on your series Kingdom. Which we only recently discovered on Netflix here in the US. And hooked we were when it suddenly ended with the announcement that Beatrice is not in fact your sister…and then nothing! How could ITV have canceled a series so engaging and so popular? We miss you terribly. (By the way…How would it have ended?) And what's next? We had gotten used to seeing you again. Very fondly, Karen and Ed NY, USA auntyjoan on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-281503 Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:12:08 +0000 auntyjoan 281503@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ Hi Stephen, I must be you oldest (70 tomorrow) and most faithful fan. I have followed you and listened to you - as you read all the 'Harry Potter' Books, your 'The Knowledge', and my favourite yet 'Moab' audio books. I wish you well in all that you do, Joan <img src="http://www.stephenfry.com/bb-content/plugins//bb-smilies/default/icon_smile.gif" title=":-)" class="bb_smilies" /> auntyjoan on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-281501 Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:06:45 +0000 auntyjoan 281501@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ <blockquote><cite>Stephen Fry <a href="//www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry#post-194073"">said</a>:</cite> Hello dear forum people. I wanted to write a word about things to you as it has been brought to my attention that not all is as happy as it might be in the world of the Fry Forum. You can imagine how much this distresses me. I am one who (to a fault, to a glaring fault, I am well aware of it) hates confrontation or unhappiness of any kind and so I tend either to pretend it isn’t going on or I run away from it. Well no good doing either in this case, so I shall take the bull by the horns, grasp the nettle and grapple the metaphor to the ground. I understand from Andrew Sampson that we cocked up royally in upgrading the forum to WordPress. In fact many of you would regard ‘upgrading’ as quite the wrong word. Firstly, we never told you it was happening and secondly it altered the experience for you in ways that many of you found objectionable. Andrew works inexpressibly hard for and with me and is as committed as I am to making the site a good place for anyone to spend time, but he would also be the first to admit that his direct Australian manner can seem abrasive to more sensitive souls (myself often included!). It’s bred in the bone, part of the culture (and the reason for Australia’s unparalleled sporting success?) but is never meant to offend or to express contempt or impatience. He sees the shortest distance between two points and can straight-line his way there without passing the square marked tactful… a gift, but sometimes a tricky one…. You may wonder why I haven’t involved myself in forum governance. I will tell you. A lot is to do with sheer cowardice and indolence. It’s all I can do to keep my head above water with my diary as it is without involving myself in the political and housekeeping issues of the forum. I want people to be happy, but there seem to be countervailing opinions as to how that is best achieved and it would be crashingly inappropriate of me to “take sides” – it’s not my business to do that and would be so unfair on you. So I keep away from forum business and hope that you manage it well without me. After all, if I was there the whole thing would be a weird controlling vanity project, not a free arena at all. I will certainly get out my chequebook and pay for the forum upgrade (without too much self-pity you should know that we’ve already spent six days on forum coding, at the cost of delays on other Samfry projects and there is still much more work to be done) but I would beg you to be patient. I know how large problems seem to you when you are inside the forum every day, and the solutions probably seem simple and easily achieved from your side. Oh, how I wish they were. The very success of the stephenfry.com site causes it to be very expensive to run and while work on the CMS and structure has enabled maintenance to be much more rationally undertaken it is still a formidable ask for a personal site that has only just started taking ads and which is still very far from paying its own way. But above all I want you to be happy, and I hope you can be happy in the way one used to be happy in grotty student accommodation. We never complained in those days about stained sofas, stuck doors, creaking floorboards and drippy walls. As we age we tend to get a bit fussy about things – I’m just asking that for the moment you put up with a bit of inconvenience and hope you can regard it as a lark. It is certainly not a sign that we don’t care. You are the most loyal of all the website visitors and this gives you the right to feel a certain kind of ownership. But I want the site and the forum to be welcoming to all. When new neighbours move in on the street nothing is more dreaded than the Resident’s Committee which lays down the law on “how things are done here”. A feeling that there is an elite is far from what any of us would want, I’m sure. • Kindly welcomes • Genuine friendliness • Consideration and appreciation of others • Acceptance and friendship • Intolerance only of rudeness and unkindness If you like my works and my deeds, what I say and what I do in the world, if you are admirers, fans or followers of my life and career, then I would hope you might feel that I try and stand for friendliness and openness, and that I can only be distressed by in-fighting, turf wars, possessiveness and resentments. I am not trying to overstate the problem, I am happy to note that the forum has not disintegrated – I am saying all this as a pre-emptive measure. To stop things going in that direction as I fear they will if we don’t all pause and consider. It is all a result of your frustration at the unwelcome and mishandled changes and we accept full responsibility for that. Without Clare and the moderators things would have really been difficult and I owe them all a huge debt, as do all users of the forum. A hundred thousand unnoticed actions from them have kept things going. But let’s concentrate on making sure that the forum welcomes newbies, alienates no one and acquires – like Chesterton’s angels – the ability to take itself lightly. If I were a corporation who made money from this website I would be duty bound (if I was an honourable corporation) to hire the five or six full time staff necessary for the running of the forum and the recoding and maintenance of its tools and environment. Sadly I am not a corporation and (at the renewed risk of self-pity) I just don’t have the time or the resources. The more Andrew can concentrate on new revenue streams for the site, the more we can pour into improving it. Which is all we want to do. So I hope, for my sake (he squeaked forlornly) you might do your best to enjoy the forum as it is for the moment, being as forbearing and friendly and patient and good-natured as you can be. If you have what builders call “snagging lists” (this tap drips, that banister is loose etc) then by all means present them, but I hope you understand that we can’t leap in and fix every problem – big as it may seem – at a moment’s notice. It’s a huge site, and as you probably know, the amount of traffic it deals with involves complexities of hosting and server clustering of a kind that make one’s poor head spin. Well, that’s it. I should have dropped in earlier I expect. Apologies for not doing so. My love and thanks to you all. To the future x Stephen</blockquote> LandRoverPETER on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-280591 Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:44:35 +0000 LandRoverPETER 280591@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ Dear Mr Fry, as a new member i would like to offer my heart felt thank you for offering me a lowly resident of the far flung land of Bambun of no neighbours hardly on my street if you can it as such.Please google Sullivan drive and i live at the end on the right on the northerly road at the southern end. I read your description about school or uni dorms and have my bucket handy if my screen on the macbook starts leaking and a rag to clean off the mould spores that may protrude from the keys. If your in the area and can offer some advance warning i can build a HIDE next to a local extinct Gilberts Potaroo hole in the loam and you could film a Potaroo, which is a small (tabby cat fur)Quokka like animal feeds at dawn and dusk.I have seen 2 in 5 years's in my back garden but generally dont hang around their habitat at dawn and dusk.I have watched a couple of your films and see you go through a lot of punishment and extreme pain sometimes in your achievements which to me is highly spirited and commendable.Thank you Peter. cprobert38 on "Special message from Stephen Fry" http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/special-message-from-stephen-fry/page/12#post-279963 Sun, 01 Jan 2012 12:07:49 +0000 cprobert38 279963@http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/ Who knew there was a problem? I only come on here intermittently to post random non-sequiters and ( sic) comments .The only reason I popped in today was to wish all Fry-dudes and Fryettes a wonderful new year. But if we take " me collegues" middle paragraph concerning freindship, openess , god my spelling is horrid, as a mantra for 2012 then we will have a delicious new year.Peace, love hamsters and meerkats to you all.