The commenting issues here are seriously driving me nuts. I’ve just written another letter of complaint on the Seed backchannel, which always seems to mean that it will sink into neglect once again, so I’ve decided to also post it here, publicly. I hate to air dirty laundry like this because I really, really like Seed, I respect all the people running the operation for both their goals and their willingness to work towards them, but they’ve just fallen down on the job of maintaining the basic nuts and bolts of the blogging system.

Look. Fixing the commenting system has to be a high priority.

When I turn off comment registration, I can tell you fairly precisely how big a load spam is causing: spam outnumbers regular comments two-fold right now, and I know from past experience that the longer I leave the barrier of registration off, the more spammers will pour in. I have got a LONG filter file to try and catch the worst of it, so the majority of the spam gets caught by the filters. It’s not enough. Even with filtering, between 25-30% of the comments that manage to get posted on my blog are pure spam. If I don’t clean it up, the successful spammers also detect that and flood threads with garbage. Anyone with a popular blog (and I presume Seed wants all of us to have popular blogs) knows that spam can easily overwhelm the comments section of even the biggest discussion of science on the web and turn it into a wasteland. I have to monitor every single comment that gets posted and cut out the trash. Manually. Do you know how many comments I get? It’s driving me insane.

The alternative is to turn on comment registration. Currently, that technology is perfectly adequate to obliterate 99.9% of the spam. It made my life so much easier — I could ignore comments for days without worry, the only spam that made it through was the occasional hand-crafted variety rather than the usual machine-generated jackhammer of repetition, it was sweet. I want it on all the time.

Except that our FUCKING BUGGY IMPLEMENTATION doesn’t work for half or more of my readers. It is inconsistent and flaky and hard to use. It’s not because these readers are stupid and incapable of working with technology, either; sometimes it bugs out on me and I can’t comment either. I’ve had to resort to maintaining a direct html link to the typepad registration system that bypasses the crappy MT interface to get it to work reliably. This is ridiculous. It is intolerable. We have a solution available with the existing software, and it is so badly mucked up that it is unusable. Seriously, if I were running my blog on my own server and had access to the guts of the software, I would have sat down with it a year ago and patched up something that worked reliably and simply. I could have even stuck in a simple captcha system which, although some spammers are doing a good job of circumventing that nowadays, would still have reduced the spam problem by an order of magnitude. And I’M NOT A SOFTWARE TECH PERSON. I’m just a casual geek.

What the hell is wrong with Seed that they can’t fix this long-pending, serious problem?

I just turned off comment registration this weekend so the people blocked by our absurdly buggy system can have a voice for a little while. I’m seeing a lot of expressions of gratitude because they are so pleased to finally get a chance to say something. That’s what I want, for people to be able to freely converse. Unfortunately, it also means I’ve got a weekend of annoyances to deal with, because I’m going to have to constantly watchdog the comments section again (in just the time it takes me to type this, 6 more spam comments appeared). I can’t do this anymore. It’s going to drive me crazy.

That means I’m going to switch registration back on on Monday — I have no choice. And once again, there will be howls of protest from my readers who are being driven crazy by our buggy software, and even worse, there will be a lot of unhappy readers who won’t be able to protest because they’ll be silenced. Unfortunately, since I am a godless tyrant, when the choice is between me going crazy and many thousands of readers going crazy, I get to win and impose my will on everyone else. We are talking about seriously unhappy readers, OK? That should matter!

Fix it now, please. There is no excuse for this kind of incompetence.

I really hate the buggy comment registration system here, and I know you do, too. However, it’s also been a huge help to me — the thousands of spam comments that were flooding in every day were throttled way back.

So I’m going to try something. The registration requirement is off, temporarily, just to let those people held back by the bugs get a word in for a while. It’s going back on on Monday, though (or sooner if the spam load becomes intolerable), simply because it eats up too much of my time if it’s not. So get your words in now.

The Molly Award for August 2009 goes to Carlie and strange gods before me. To quote another recipient of some random award out of the blue, “accept this award as a call to action“.

Congratulations to both, and now that that’s out of the way, you know the drill — leave comments here with your nominations for best commenter of September 2009.

Too much garbage is coming down the pipeline, so I’m going to have to throttle it. I’m flipping the switch to require registration in order to comment, just for a while. If it locks out too many good people, I’ll flip it off again…but I really need to do this to limit some of the spam.

I got many excellent and informed suggestions on how to handle the death threats a certain deranged spammer has been making here, and I’ve acted on them. I gathered together all of the crazy posts he made over the course of one evening, and printed them out in very small print — it made for a small 61 page book, which would be impressive if it weren’t so repetitive and vapid. I took it down to the local police station, along with what little we know about Markuze’s addresses, IP numbers, email, and phone numbers, and plopped it down in front of a police officer.

He was amazed. He said they occasionally get to handle internet threats, but it’s usually a few rude remarks texted via cell phone by an angry teenager. The sustained lunacy of Markuze has set a new standard for crazy in Morris, Minnesota. So Dennis has accomplished something in his life at last.

It is now entirely in the hands of law enforcement, and all further complaints will wend their ponderous way through official channels. Our local police will talk to the Montreal police and alert them to the loon on a hair trigger in their midst, and will also alert national law agencies; I hope Mr Markuze has no plans to travel to the US at any time in the near future, because he may have some difficulties at the border.

But we’re all done. Please go back to ignoring his ravings, and I’ll go back to quietly deleting them.

Really, I frackin’ know about the crappy MSNBC poll about having “In god we trust” on our money. I’ve known about it for months and months. I am currently receiving about 20-30 notifications a day from random people that I should crash that poll.

Please, please STOP.

It’s a dead poll. It’s been hacked and slashed and butchered and cheated into the most amazing state of pointless stupidity. It’s got 16 million votes on it, almost all from a handful of people running scripts on a computer. It is apparently on some wingnut email that is circulating aimlessly in the Sargasso of lies and rumors and urban folklore that stagnates forever in the mailing lists of cranks and bored office workers, and is constantly revivified by someone who sees it for the first time.

It is currently the #1 most common single topic in my new mail folder. I am about to blow up and launch fireballs of wrath at anyone who sends it to me again. Actually, what I’m going to have to do is start blacklisting everyone who sends it to me — that’ll make the email slightly more manageable. But if you do send me email telling me about an MSNBC poll, it will be the last piece of email I ever see from you. Got it?

Well. You know, I mentioned that my contributions here were going to be greatly reduced for a while, while I was busy plugging away at this damnable book. I had a very busy and productive day, pounding away at the keyboard, and didn’t even look at the site until this evening…and then what do I discover? Traffic is up!

I get the message. You don’t need me at all. Instead, all it takes is a wacky creationist or two yammering away on a random thread to trigger SIWOTI syndrome and get you all refreshing over and over.

Just for that, I’m going to put my head down again tomorrow and hammer out more words that won’t go in the internet. I expect a zillion page views, OK?

The new Molly winner for the month of July has been determined: give ‘Tis Himself hearty congratulations and many backslaps. Now we need to figure out who the hot commenter for the month of August was — leave your suggestions in the comments.

Now some terrifying news: I’m supposed to talk with a publisher next week, which of course has me staring fixedly at text and seeing all the huge and awful flaws in it. I’m going to be frantically polishing all weekend, so you may not see much of me for a while.

I’m thinking if I go through everything carefully and dot all my ‘i’s with smiley faces^*, and put it all in a shiny clear plastic cover, it’ll look much more impressive.

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^*Wait…would dotting them with hearts be better? Oh, decisions, decisions.

Here it is, mid-August, and I just let it slide…I noticed the nagging comments back when I was away, but then let them slide until I suddenly remembered today that there was some administrative chore I’d been neglecting. It is now corrected, and the latest Molly Awards for June are now online. My apologies.

There were two winners this month. The first is Jadehawk, and it’s about time. You guys have been throwing votes her way for so long, and at last they reached critical mass. The second winner is a bit troubling. You voted for a fundamentalist Christian on my blog, and I almost decided to void that vote right there. But then I realized that winning the acclaim of the Pharyngulistas means he is definitely going to hell now, so I decided to allow the election of Smoggy Batzrubble to stand. Floyd Rubber is going to have to give him a thorough flagellation and purification this weekend, that’s for sure.

I know July is long gone, so you’re going to have to stretch your memories a bit — but you’re clever, you can do it. Leave your votes in the comments for the commenter most deserving the Molly Award for July 2009.