Commenting changes coming

You know, this is an incredibly busy time of the year for me: the semester is winding down, students are freaking out, I’ve got vast scary piles of grading, and I’m committing to large amounts of time to small group tutorial sessions. I’m swamped. So when some fucking idiot named Chris decides to flaunt his inanity by spamming the site with German song lyrics in an attempt to a) drown out the conversation (selfish pig), and b) demonstrate his pathetic programming skills, requiring me to spend a half-hour tracking down and cleaning up his mess, I get furious. So furious at his arrogance and destructive efforts that I’m going to give you the information he used to login before he switched to an anonymizer. He used a pseudonym, [email protected], at the IP address 74.43.13.138 , static-74-43-13-138.fnd.frontiernet.net. He’s a spammer whose sole talent seems to be the ability to copy-paste repetitively.

In response, to prevent further abuse at the hands of brain-damaged morons like “Chris”, I’m going to have to implement comment registration. I’m switching it on temporarily this afternoon. Try to make it work. If it doesn’t, I’ll be switching it off at 4pm Central so you can voice your complaints and tell me what’s wrong. If you can’t comment in the next few hours, tinker and figure out how to register. If you can’t, come back this evening when the registration requirement is turned off again, and we’ll figure out how to make it work for all the honest, responsible commenters.

Pharyngula sells out!

Welcome to the world of the bourgeouisie, people! The Pharyngula store (conveniently located in a tab at the top of this window) is now available to take your money and deliver into your hands cheesy QUALITY merchandise. Get a t-shirt! A stickypus! Or in a timely gesture to the War on Christmas, get your very own “Happy Monkey” holiday greeting cards!


(Rebecca Watson action figure not included)

Look how happy he is! You can simultaneously send a non-confrontational, cheerful card to your family and friends, and give the wingnuts apoplexy by going one step beyond “Happy Holidays” and “Seasons Greetings” in delivering non-Christian sentiment!

And wait! There’s more! And I don’t just mean more exclamation points, either! Get your buttons!

AWESOME!

All are now available for order. Limited quantities will be available at Skepticon.

I give up

It’s clear the bugs introduced in the server upgrade have NOT been fixed. New posts are scrambled up with old comments, and I have no idea where submitted comments are going to end up.

I recommend leaving Pharyngula for a day or two until these severe problems are actually fucking fixed. That’s what I’m going to do, anyway. Yeah, BOYCOTT PHARYNGULA.

Proceeding with caution

As you all know by now, the last couple of days worth of entries got totally munged up by the server upgrade — comments lost, comments moved to the wrong article, whole articles vanishing. I am greatly annoyed and mystified, since a server move shouldn’t be generating so much thrashing chaos.

I’ve been told the uncertainties have been mostly fixed up and things should work normally now, although the entries since last Friday afternoon are kind of a shambles still. I’m going to put up a few things today, but I’m taking it slow — I really don’t trust this piece of crap right now.

That’s a boring banner

The The Crommunist Manifesto has a very unexciting banner, and he’s looking for help fixing it. If you’ve got any artistic talent at all, get on over there and put something better together.

Also the quote from Christopher Hitchens that he wants to display is fabulous and wonderfully appropriate:

The stubborn persistence of chauvinism in our life and letters is or ought to be the proper subject for critical study, not the occasion for displays of shock.