The Molly Award for the month of November goes to Emmet Caulfield. Buy him a beer, someone.

Now we have to pick one for December — leave your nomination in the comments!

We’ve got a few new trolls/poes babbling in some of the threads, and it’s getting out of a hand. I think it’s time to remind you that the list of bannable offenses does include godbotting — and it doesn’t matter if you are sincere or if you’re clowning around, once I get tired of the games I will start adding your user info to the blacklist. It would be a shame to get your IP address locked out of commenting because you thought it would be funny to run a fake creationist under an alias.

We do have word that there will be a major update to the scienceblogs software in the next month. You shouldn’t see any difference (except, I hope, better performance), but there is the possibility of implementing changes to the commenting system after that, and I may have to go to some kind of registration system to limit some of the insincere distractions that have been going on.

Uh-oh…I’ve been so scatterbrained lately that I’ve neglected the Molly Awards. You know how it goes: I put up a post for nominations, leave it to simmer for a while, it scrolls off the bottom of the page, and I lose track of it all. Then I come back and the soup is all scorched and horrible. Oh, wait, no — it’s fine! This internet thingie let’s comments sit there forever if I let it.

Anyway, I’ve caught up with two months’ worth of nominations, and here they are:

For September, two awards: Patricia and Nick Gotts. Give ’em some belated applause!

For October, the winner actually got lots of votes for September, too, but if I gave her both months’ awards everyone would accuse me of being lazy (which would especially sting because it would be true). So, finally, SC gets the Molly for October.

Now that I’m all caught up, of course, it’s time to collect nominations for the best commenter of November. Leave your suggestions here, and someone remind me before they all boil over this time.

DO NOT SEND ME ANY MORE REQUESTS TO CRASH THE PBS POLL ON SARAH PALIN. I am receiving over 50 email requests per day to do it, and there are a dozen comments every day mentioning it. You don’t see them because I’ve had to specifically add a filter to trash them automatically, and similarly, I’ve got an email filter that is killing all the messages direct to me. I know, the stupid poll has gone viral and there is email circulating all over the web asking people to vote on it, and everyone who sees it forwards it on to me, for some reason. It’s been done. It is a thoroughly hacked poll already. Please read my previous plea, This poll is an ex-poll, OK?.

At this rate, I might just have to put up a permanent, big, bold banner across the top of Pharyngula that tells people to throw that email about the PBS poll away.

Things are getting ugly at scienceblogs right now — you’ve probably noticed all the errors in making comments, and those of us on the inside are struggling even more to get through to put up posts. Rumor has it that we may be undergoing some kind of denial-of-service attack — we’re short of information ourselves, since our tech people are too busy tearing their hair out and pounding on recalcitrant iron to give us updates. We’ll know more when everything is fixed. Soon, I hope. Until then, have patience and try not to post too many duplicate comments.

We may have to switch to old media. I’ll be on KPFT radio tonight, at 10:30 pm Central, along with some other guy named Phil Plait. I think we’re going to talk about the Republican version of supporting science, which consistes of complaining about overhead projectors and bear DNA, while endorsing candidates who believe Jesus would hunt dinosaurs from his helicopter.

Scienceblogs is experiencing some technical difficulties right now: the guts of the machine are being very recalcitrant and generating time-out errors all over the place. Please be patient and heed the message when making comments: getting an error when posting does not necessarily mean the comment did not get posted. Most often, it just means that the MovableType software has gotten very, very stupid.

And if you think you’re having problems with comments, you can’t imagine how bad it is for us trying to post articles. I just tried to create a new entry, and went off to a doctor’s appointment while waiting for the window to open.

Now that it is October, it is time to finally announce the winner of the August Molly award: our first non-human primate wins by a landslide, the Rev. BigDumbChimp. There may have been a few irregularities in the voting, since his backers were able to raise twice as many thumb-like appendages in approval compared to the others, but we will accept it as a reasonable consequence of biological diversity.

Now let’s move on to September. State who you think was the most interesting, insightful, amusing, thoughtful, or attention-seeking commenter for the past month in the comments below.

I should be flying through the air right now, on my way to Los Angeles for another long travel weekend. I was also out of town last week, and to my shame was too busy to post a Friday Cephalopod. I will not make that mistake this time: in recompense, tomorrow I will post THREE (3) Friday Cephalopods and recite 10 Hail Cthulhus while lashing myself with a wet tentacle. The latter will, of course, be done in private, but look for my public penance on Friday.

The counter on the page is ticking upwards to the millionth scienceblogs comment — we’re less than 50 comments away, so the winning submission might be right here on this thread — so it’s a good time to remind you Minnesota region residents that Greg & PZ’s Excellent Party will take place the day after tomorrow, Thursday, at 7pm. You are all required to attend and make a comment.