When a commenter says she is a 14 year old girl who is a home-schooled genius, thinks Evolution, Genetics and Astral Projection are neat-o, peppers her comments with grammatical and spelling errors and “giggles”, says she wishes a sexy man would give her a massage, claims that her hobbies include body painting — nude body painting — and posts links to photos purportedly of herself engaging in that hobby…shouldn’t there be little alarm bells going off in your heads? Actually, maybe big bells, a giant cathedral carillon, sirens going whoop-whoop-whoop, and flares going up? I know, sometimes it’s hard to believe how kooky some people in the real world can be, but this 14 year old girl wrote more like how a 40 year old virgin male would think a 14 year old girl would write.

Shorter version: ‘Victoria Fox’ is banned, and the last couple of days worth of ‘her’ trolling have been disemvowelled. Please don’t encourage the preverts, OK?

We seem to have some fresh meat new creationists coming by. It’s been a while since we had such an opportunity—they seem to run away so quickly—so I’m going to remind everyone of the 3 comment rule. Please give people a chance to explain themselves before you decide to pound on them, OK? Abuse is a few doors down the hall, this is supposed to be Argument.

Along those same lines, we have a few persistent trolls who keep coming back. I kill them as I see them (these are a few so far gone that they don’t get disemvowelled, just junked), but please don’t engage them. I’m going to start trashing replies, too, just to discourage people from feeding the trolls.

Also, there are a few people who are being just plain vicious. That’s my job, and I’m beginning to resent the usurpation of my reputed evil temperament. Again, if you find yourself writing 5 snarling comments in a row, stop. Take a break. Dunk your head in some cool water. I’m not one to encourage drug abuse, but some people here need Vicodin, Oxycontin, Xanax and Percocet by the handfuls. If you’ve got to attack someone, and you can’t at least make it light and funny, go out on your front porch and yell at those damn kids instead.

We’re getting lots of comments lately, and you’ve got to stop over-reacting to the occasional jostle.

So I got some email a while back about this free and easy to use web-based chat room service…and heck, it’s so simple I thought I’d give it a whirl. Here’s a link to a Pharyngula chat room—try it out and let me know how it goes. I’ll plan on checking in myself now and then, but don’t wait up for me, talk among yourselves.

I will definitely plan on popping in at 8pm Central time tonight (Friday), if you really want to yell at me online. We’ll see how it goes; I don’t know how well it will hold up if ten people are trying to converse at once, and I also notice that there doesn’t seem to be any way to authenticate identities, so it’s not clear to me how much noise will be generated.

You may have noticed that the site has been down for a while. We were hit with a combination of problems.

First, we have been plagued by this idiot script-kiddie, the registrant for usuc.us:

(Information erased: a call to the person to which the domain is registered reveals he has no idea what is going on. Does anybody know how to inform the domain name registry that it is registered under a false name and get it deleted?)

He has been running a bot that injects some javascript into a search string that redirects the scienceblogs main page to google, since the main page rather foolishly embeds the top search strings into the html. We’ve known about this for a few days.

Second, the sciencebloggers’ complaints about this have been effectively ignored by the management here (and I think many of us are getting more pissed about this neglect of an obvious problem than anything else.) Several of us have been running a rather kludgy and ugly workaround, inserting code on our pages that secretly runs searches, too, to displace Mr Sullivan’s hack from the list of top searches. This has caused performance problems—we’ve basically been trying to out-thrash the bot to keep it from taking over the main page. A more elegant way to fix this would have been to patch up the search display on the main page, but we don’t have access to that.

Third, in the midst of all the overwork to which we were subjecting MT and the server, MT ate a large chunk of the Pharyngula template code. Poof, my page disappeared. At least that absence reduced the server load so everyone else’s pages were running a little better.

Anyway, the bottom line is that right now the scienceblogs main page will occasionally whisk you off to google, the Pharyngula index page is a corrupt and broken shambles, and server performance seems to be up and down.

Since I was asked to do something about that empty “About” tab at the top of this page that used to take you to a really boring page that said “Lorem ipsum,” I’ve put a little useful information up there. It now tells you what Pharyngula means and how to pronounce it, has a few biographical details, and by popular request, includes links to the complete random quote file, the complete “Taste of Pharyngula” file, and the complete blogroll. The layout needs a little work, but the information is there, at least.

I just got hit by a major wave of comment spam, and it took me while to puzzle out all the tools available in this MT system to purge them. I’m tinkering a little bit with comment settings to try and prevent it from happening again (tip: don’t put lots of links in comments, because they will get held up for my approval before posting), and I’ve clicked a few checkboxes in the settings on. If things get freaky and it doesn’t let you comment, send me an email and I’ll try to fix it.