Some people are still encountering bugs when trying to register for commenting, and a few of them have been emailing me. I don’t know what to do! I’ve forwarded your email to the powers-that-be, and we’ll see if something gets fixed some more.
Otherwise, if anyone out there has suggestions, leave them here. Is there one registration service that is more reliable than the others?
I hate to tell you this, but tomorrow I’ll be switching required registration back on. There are far too many spammers and trolls hitting the place right now.
This is pretty cool: Scienceblogs and National Geographic have joined forces to create a mighty partnership to conquer the interwebs. I think. I’m not sure on what exactly we’ll gain just yet, but the people with vision at the top have hinted at some juicy things.
Here’s the press release:
National Geographic Digital Media (NGDM) and ScienceBlogs.com today announced that they have formed a strategic partnership spanning technology, advertising, business and content development. Through this partnership, Nationalgeographic.com and ScienceBlogs.com will create and exchange content through connected social media features, as well as work together to create new multimedia programming for both sites. ScienceBlogs.com will feature content from National Geographic bloggers and National Geographic explorers. The site also will have access to National Geographic’s news resources and will significantly increase its exposure through NGDM’s worldwide audience. NGDM in turn will feature content from ScienceBlogs.com and renowned SB bloggers on its award-winning site Nationalgeographic.com.
In addition, NGDM will lead advertising sales — headed by Jim Hoos, VP of Digital Media Sales — on ScienceBlogs.com, adding a vibrant social media platform to the portfolio and giving advertisers access to an audience of more than 2 million young, educated and digitally savvy readers. Under the terms of the agreement, NGDM will acquire a minority stake in ScienceBlogs, LLC, parent company of ScienceBlogs.com.
“ScienceBlogs.com shares our mission to create a fully comprehensive Web destination that allows users to explore, engage and exchange,” said John Caldwell, NGDM president. “This partnership not only allows National Geographic to strengthen its leadership in the science and technology space, but it also allows NG.com to reach an extensive community of young and engaged users who are deeply immersed within it.”
“We are thrilled to be teaming up with National Geographic, a brand we greatly admire and an organization that shares the values of the ScienceBlogs community. This partnership highlights SB’s standing in social media and lays the foundation for growth and greater reach and recognition in the future,” said Adam Bly, chairman of ScienceBlogs, LLC.
NGDM and ScienceBlogs.com’s initial rollout will feature blog content and applications that highlight green, science and technology subject matter.
Nah, I know you didn’t…but I finally got around to tallying up the votes, and the winners of the Molly award for the month of September are Desert Son [New complementary close under construction] and Feynmaniac. You may now give them the traditional champagne shower.
While you’re at it, start nominating commenters for the October Molly. You have forgotten October, I know, and are thinking November and Thanksgiving and all that, but you’re going to have to try and recollect before the big push in the War on Christmas comes along and all other issues have to be neglected.
I know that Seed and SixApart have been busily tinkering with the comments section to “improve” things, but I don’t know exactly what they’re doing. It’s gotten weird, though, and many of you are sending me complaints that you can’t comment any more — I haven’t banned anyone recently, I swear.
It seems to be in a transitional state. Some of the problems may be a result of parts of the html or css being cached on your computer, and the server is getting confused. Try reloading/refreshing the page to force a full update; it might work. It might not. I was initially locked out myself, and it took a couple of forced reloads before it started functioning again.
Anyway, any anomalies are not at all personal, but are a result of the mechanics taking a sledgehammer to the undercarriage. All will be resolved eventually. I hope.
People keep writing to me to complain that the goddamn stupid comment registration system doesn’t work, so they can’t comment. Yes, you can. Just ignore registration and fill in the blanks with name and email (which isn’t shown), and you can comment.
This is especially irritating since I turned off the comment registration system some time back, and have been dealing with all the spam that’s been pouring in for the last two weeks just so people would be able to freely comment. I’m still plowing through all the comments that accumulated over my long weekend away, too…and was thinking I should have turned it back on while I was gone.
It’s rather pathetic when banned loons like “help ma boab” come crawling back, begging to be released from the dungeon…especially when their apologies are this insincere. It just reaffirms why he got tossed in there in the first place.
I’m Sorry
I’m sorry that I trod on someone’s arrogant, over-inflated, preposterous ego. Can I come back onto your blog? I promise I won’t do it again. Pretty please?
No.
Scienceblogs grows a little more, with the addition of two new blogs.
We now have Pamela Ronald talking about food and farm science at Tomorrow’s Table. That should fill a gap in the coverage here!
The other entry might be of more interest to readers here, because of the topics covered. We’ve drawn David Sloan Wilson away from the awful Huffington Post, and he’ll be posting on Evolution for Everyone. He’s a very big name in evolution, and I’ve commented on his work before: I think he’s provocative and interesting, but disagree strongly with him on some parts of his ideas about religion. I’ll also be very interested in seeing him present his case for group selection.
Since I posted that open letter to Seed, it’s only fair to post the reply I received the other day.
We’ve just signed off with Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, to begin Phase I of our registration program. You won’t actually see too many changes with this phase – we’re essentially just cleaning up technical glitches within the system and making sure it’s performing properly.
Included in this phase are:
- Commenter Authentication Fixes — meaning that you should be able to turn on Movable Type’s native registration option without commenting errors occurring
- Load Balancer fixes
- Server Analysis and Recommendations
- Movable Type 4.3 Upgrade
- Plugin Maintenance
- Comment Enhancements for Sponsored Blogs — enabling us to offer sponsors special features they request for their blogs such as comment threading that our readers haven’t demonstrated as much interest in
Phase II will be where all the actual registration features come in, once we’ve got everything shipshape. [We] will be in touch about what will be involved from your end with implementing Phase I — probably at least an overnight posting freeze while we upgrade, as we’ve done in the past — when we have more details about when this will happen, but Six Apart should have resources available to us within the next two to three weeks.
So the good news is that they’re going straight to the pros at Six Apart to fix our problems; the bad news is that that means some more delays while we wait for the experts. Hang in there.
