My fault, the site was screwed up for over an hour—it’s a really bad idea to slip when typing “</p>” and type “<?p>” instead.

I’ve turned on the requirement to login and register with TypeKey in order to make a comment. Can’t stand it? Things not working? Leave a comment (if you can) or mail me (if you can’t).

This is a trial, we’ll see if it works. I’m willing to turn it off again if it causes more grief than it solves.

Ooops. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the TypeKey page. It’s simply a centralized site where you register once, get a password, and then you can use that password to make comments on various sites, including this one. It doesn’t cost anything, it’s fairly easy to do.

Another hint: some people are having problems that seem to be traceable to their browser’s cache. Try reloading pages or clearing the browser cache so that it will display the version with the new TypeKey requirements.

I owe many people some apologies: this site has been quietly eating your comments. There are filters set up to catch and discard spam comments, and they work very well. I’m getting thousand or so junk comments a week that are not making it through to be displayed.

Unfortunately, about a 5% of the junked comments are false positives. I’ve gone through and tried to restore the ones I could find, but that represents a far too substantial loss of blameless comments.

I’ve set up the comments section now to optionally allow TypeKey registration. I’m hoping that the software is smart enough to realize that if you’ve gone through TypeKey, you are not spamming, and that that will improve the accuracy of spam detection—so use it, if you don’t mind TypeKey. I might go further still and require TypeKey at some point; I suspect most people would rather jump through a few more hoops and have better reliability, than type something up and have the mysterious and ineffable spam filter decide to quietly shuffle your words off to the holding pen before erasing them a few days later.

Let me know any objections or suggestions you might have.

It’s been a long, long day of committee meetings and classes and various other time-sucks. Time to unwind with a Friday Random Ten.

A helpful reader has improved his killfile script—now you don’t need to edit it at all, and it puts a little “kill” link in each comment so you can easily take out annoying commenters with a click. Again, this requires Firefox with the Greasemonkey plugin, so you IE users and us Safari people are out of luck.

I try to avoid censoring people here, and it takes some persistent nuisance value to get evicted. There are a few people, though, who really don’t add any value to the site, even though they haven’t done anything (yet) to warrant banning them. A reader sent me this script many of you might find useful: it requires Firefox and the greasemonkey plugin, and what it does is chop comments by certain people out of the page, so you don’t have to see them, or even see comments by people that refer to them. Cool—a www killfile!

If you’re interested, click here to download it. It’s currently set to kill comments by “JMcH” (I know there is now a sudden surge of interest), but as it’s simply a text file, it looks like it would be easy to edit to zap comments by anyone (even “PZ Myers”).

Maybe the author will speak up in the comments and help anyone out who has trouble getting it to work…please don’t ask me, though, I’m providing this as is.