I’m a bad, bad man — I’ve been neglecting the Molly awards for too long. Let’s fix that! For those who don’t know, the Molly awards are how we acknowledge valued and insightful commenters here, by allowing readers to nominate the names of the people they enjoy seeing in the comment threads, and the prize is that those names get enshrined on a web page.

The last round of nominations was in February. There are two winners for February 2008: Truth Machine and Mrs Tilton. Say “Huzzah!” and break out the champagne!

Now we’re a month behind, and we need nominations for both March and April. Maybe you can’t remember what anyone said in March, though, so let’s do it this way: everyone should make a general suggestion for someone you’ve known as a regular here for some time, and I’ll pick from those for the March award; and you should also make a more specific nomination for someone who has impressed you lately, and I’ll pick from those for the April award.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re having problems all across scienceblogs. Few of us can post at all, and those who can are reporting errors all over (I will be amazed if this post makes it through). You are also unable to comment.

The crack team of Seed technical experts are delving deep into the guts of the software as I write this, butchering gremlins as they go. No word yet on when we’ll be able to post again.

It’s that time again: nominate your favorite commenter(s) in the thread for this post, and we’ll see who gets to be honored with a Molly this month. You can check the last Molly thread if you want to see what worthies lost out last time.

Also, you may recall that story of a large snake that tried to swallow a large alligator … this is how I feel right now.

I have updated my blogroll with as many of the new submissions in the last Open Enrollment day as I could. It’s getting a bit bloated, I’m afraid. I do have to explain a few things, though.

If you aren’t on the current list even though you submitted your blogroll, there are a few possibilities. Some of you were already on it, so look harder. Some of the blogs failed to load — it’s nothing personal, but if there were technical difficulties at the time I tried to add you, I didn’t try too hard to overcome them. Some of the submissions did not have a syndication feed, and I’m afraid that I can only follow blogs with some kind of feed.

Everything in the blogroll comes straight out of the feed, including the title. If the title doesn’t look right, don’t blame me: check the settings on the RSS/Atom feed on your site. Also, some blogs have a little descriptive tag line after the title; again, that just comes out of your feed.

I’ve put the list of new blogs below the fold. Remember to nominate a new deserving commenter for a Molly!

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You should all be pleased to know that MAJeff has been mollyfied.

I’m dying here, people. It’s spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spammity, spam, spam, spam. I get up every morning and get to spend a half hour cleaning up the crap that accumulates every night, and have to invest more time at intervals during the day purging it. On top of that, as many of you know, the spam filters we have here are garbage. That’s a little unfair — I’m sure they’re keeping out 99% or more of the spam — but it’s the perception we all have. Certain commenters are routinely singled out for exclusion by the filters for mysterious reasons; some combination of adjacent letters in their username seems to trip the spam filters, maybe, except that when I examine the filter results I don’t see any indication of that happening. Other times spammers with comments full of random links get through; legitimate commenters with no links, no profanity, no commercial pitches get held up. It looks entirely arbitrary, and it’s driving me nuts.

I blame Movable Type. Of all the blogware I’ve worked with, it’s approach to handling spam is primitive and inept — it’s almost as if they’ve made a deal with the spammers to keep their prevention leaky and ineffective…or it may just be that the popularity of MT means the spammers work harder to punch holes in it.

Anyway, I appeal to the tech experts out there: is there a good, solid, comprehensive set of tools for MT that actually work at keeping spam at bay? Are there any plug-ins that can improve comment handling in general?

If this keeps up, I may have to switch back to using TypeKey registration to comment, which was an annoying nuisance and caused a lot of new problems to crop up last time I did it (and also makes me wonder if the incompetence of MT’s spam handling is an intentional ploy to drive people to TypeKey). But it may be necessary, since I really don’t have that much free time to play janitor on the comments.

It’s that time of the month again — it’s time to confer upon some worthy commenter the December 2007 Order of the Molly award. Just leave a comment here naming your favorite person on Pharyngula, and I’ll see that they get added to the distinguished ranks.

It is my honor to induct into the Grand Order of the Molly, with all rights, privileges, powers, and obligations thereof, the distinguished commenter known as Sastra. Everyone stand up, applaud frantically, and remember to bow when you meet her in the street henceforth.

It’s mid-November, so it’s time to suggest new inductees into the Order of the Molly. Leave comments in this thread naming your favorite commenters!

We do have a bunch of new people here, but please don’t even dream of nominating any from the influx of wacky denialists — it’ll make me grumpy.