Roger, maybe one who works in a related field who is interested in prediction as a hobby? Also, I think you overstate a bit the problem with stealing preliminary results. For example, theer are like 15,000 abstracts every year for the fall AGU meeting and these are online freely available. Many, maybe most, of these are preliminary results.

The problem as I see it is that a site like EQF is working on, as I understand it, which is so uncritical of whatever earthquake approach someone might propose (including earthquake clouds, Shan's tilts, ear tones, and on and on) will be so full of unevaluated junk as to be meaningless. Let's say for argument that one or 2 things might have promise (say, strong geomagnetic storms over magma chambers, or earthquake clouds; I am not saying these have any promise: this is just for argument). Whatever possibly useful information that may be out there in the amateur science world will be drowned out by junk. It sounds like there is no mechanism proposed to filter.

That is why Earthwaves may be more interesting: new people come along once in a while, post predictions, some of us look at them, sometimes we learn what they are based on, they seem to have no success or little or no science logic, and some of them go away after a while. Or some, like Glen's, may have some science logic to them but also no record of success. Of course, the professional seismologic community has no real record of success in advance of the quakes either.

Christchurch is an example of where what I do professionally might actually be useful: the construction in Christchurch evidently was not adequate, in part because they were unware of the fault that broke in September. I make people aware of faults. For example, the Descanso fault is only a few km off the San Diego coast. That was known, but what was not know is that it dips away from the mainland, and it is part of a much longer fault system that starts near Newport Beach (it was known that it runs far into Mexico; eg. Legg 1991). It's existence was controversial: it is a significant fault in the last few million years. Our interpretation and data were not focused on the last few thousand years; the USGS is probably working on that aspect.
Chris