I have been reminded that I neglected the last round of nominations for the Molly. Forgive me! I have gone back and quickly tallied the last set of votes, and the Molly for the month of February goes to…AJ Milne. Belated fireworks and applause and hugs and kisses!

Now it’s time to leave your nominations for the best of the month of March right here in the comments.

Some of our stats have been released to the press today.

ScienceBlogs.com, the leading social media site in the science category, today released traffic figures for 2009 and the first quarter of 2010 (Source: Google Analytics).

• Visits for the quarter ending March 31 grew by 41% year-over-year to approximately 13 million, and page views topped 25 million. Monthly unique visitors grew to 2.4 million worldwide and in the US surpassed 2 million for the first time this March.

• Total visits for 2009 grew by 55% year-over-year to 45 million and average monthly unique visitors climbed 49% to 1.9 million.

• ScienceBlogs.com has achieved high double-digit traffic growth (at least 50%) every year since its launch in 2006.

You will be assimilated.

I also notice that the number of comments on Pharyngula alone is around 954,000, and we’ll probably hit a million sometime early this summer.

I noticed people were getting a little anxious for the latest Molly award, but I usually try to hold off to a weekend. It’s worth waiting a few days, right? Anyway, the Molly for January 2010 goes to Paul W. You’re all expected to follow his example and write treatises in the comments from now on.

Now you have to get to work and leave votes for the February Molly in the comments here.

Hey, look, I’m not too late with the Molly awards! The Molly for the month of December is split between John Morales, who seems to turn up in the list of candidates every month, and Leigh Williams, who stirred up some controversy in the voting because she is a Christian and we are, after all, a godless horde. I figure hanging out with us at least makes her an honorary atheist, since so many of her fellow co-religionists will damn her to hell anyway.

Now think back to January 2010. Which commenter should get the award for that month? Leave a comment here.

But let me correct that and catch up with some more administrative tidying up here.

The winner of the Molly Award for the month of November is Aratina Cage! As is traditional, he now owes you all a drink at the bar.

Now we have to find the most popular commenter for December of 2009: leave comments with your nominations right here in this thread.

The buggy software is better now, but some people are still completely unable to comment — and the primary complaint I’m getting is that the confirmation email needed to register never arrives. One possibility is that somehow, your domain or name or something is blocked by some systemwide filter.

If that’s your problem, send me a note using the same email address you used to register. I’ll forward those to the people in charge so they can dig through the system and discover why ScienceBlogs hates you. Then we’ll slap it silly and tell it to love you instead.

A crack team of programmers swept through the commenting code over the last several days, and cleaned up a bunch of stuff of an unspecified nature. Now the real test is in performance: is registration working any better? Let us know here.

Comment registration will be switched back on in the next hour.

I truly, deeply, fervently hate spammers.

The comment registration system here is still a PITA. I know; I get so many complaints from so many people, yet at the same time, I need the dog-damned thing in order to manage the horrendous pile of spam and troll-trash spilling over into the comments.

So I’m going to compromise a bit. I will occasionally switch off the comment registration requirement for random periods of time, just so people who are locked out by its clumsiness can get a word in; but I will also sporadically switch it back on whenever the noise gets to me. Which might be every day. Or every couple of days. Or every weekend. I don’t know, it depends on how much annoyance I can handle.

There’s a hierarchy of increasing pain at work here.

1. The best solution would be for SixApart to get in here and fix the registration system so it worked reliably for everyone, which I suspect would mean moving away from their beloved TypeKey/Moveable Type in-house schemes. Which suck.

2. Everyone who can use the registration system continues to do so, while I sometimes allow anonymous/unregistered comments for people who can’t register. This sucks for the unregistered, because you never know when the registration lockout will come down, but at least they can comment sometimes.

3. I just switch on comment registration full time. People who can register feel little pain, people who can’t will simply be silenced.

4. I shut off comment registration permanently. Everyone rejoices, except for me, who suffers horribly behind the scenes. In this non-egalitarian universe of Pharyngula, I’m sorry, but my pain counts far more than the pain of a million readers.

We’ve been operating under solution 3 this past week, and I’m switching now to solution 2 for the indefinite future. We will not be going back to solution 4 ever again, because it makes me cry like a little baby every morning when I wake up to the nightmare of cleaning up the comments here. Solution 1 is what we all dream of, but we are at the mercy of SixApart, and they are evil and capricious gods with their own agenda, which does not seem to involve enhancing the interactive part of blogging.

The bottom line is that if you can’t get registered (it’s not your fault, the blame lies on the weed-smoking brain-damaged monkeys they apparently hired to code that stuff), you still suffer, but I will intermittently switch off the hell-code so you can type in a few words. Then I’ll slam it down again, and you won’t know when.