I'm sorry it was so long. The thing, is, I could have provided links to 80% of what I said, and footnotes to 15% more. I also could have written another 10,00 words on the subject. Some of the articles written BY LDS professors of history of religion on the conflict of academic honesty and being a 'loyal Saint." are fascinating.
Even more interesting is FAIR. Do you remember how PD's "stock" post warned about anti-LDS posters picking and choosing? I took him up on his offer and spent several days on the FAIRLDS website. Fascinating for many reasons. For example, there's a recent book on each of Joseph Smith's wives. FAIRLDS cites it for the premise that Smith may not have had sexual relations with one of the 14-year olds that he married. However, it then warns that the book has been criticized, and links the criticisms - all of which, if I remember, come from FARMS. I read the criticism. They consist of "well, there's not enough evidence that Smith married X, despite the sealing of them as man and wife in the Nauvoo temple records, and the author didn't filter his rewriting to making it spiritually uplifting." (in other words, we don't disagree with the facts, but some of this stuff made Smith look bad, like the fact you produced journals and other evidence that Smith went to the families of teenage girls and told them the salvation of the entire family depended on the girl marrying him, then took the girl in a room and told her that the entire family and the girl was damned unless she married him).
Then, FAIRLDS had a link to the book it had cited as evidence that Smith had never had sex with one of the 14-year old wives - a link that was a placeholder with canned text saying "its been determined this book has anti-mormon material in it and is LDS members shouldn't read it. We'll write about it when we get time."
In other words, we've cited it as authority, but we don't want you to read the authority, and we don't like the book, but we can't explain why and we've just put up this placeholder. The book, by the way, won the Mormon Book of the Year award.
There are lots of places where FAIRLDS comments that something is or isn't true, and has a 'link' or 'source' after it, suggesting that there's authority for the statement. However, if you click on the link, it takes you to a placeholder page, where FAIRLDS apparently intends to put some authority for its statement later, but there's no authority yet.
Sometimes, the authority for a statement is something like "if the reader doesn't understand the outstanding character of Joseph and Hiram Smith, then the reader had problems, because they were of sterling character and should not be questioned."
There's also a page where it says the character of the witnesses listed in the Book of Mormon cannot be questioned, and a link for each of them, suggesting supporting authority. Unfortunately, if you click on one of the links, you get a source stating that the individual was unstable in his religious views, changed them often, and could not be trusted as an individual.
Many of the other 'sources" are short papers written by FAIRLDS members.
You can see why the LDS church is not affiliated with FAIRLDS. FAIRLDS is laughable, but they are like bulldogs - deny, deny, deny, attack, attack, attack. I could write an long analysis of the site, with links, that would kneecap PD.