Orac is the nom de blog of a (not so) humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. (Continued 
Although the most serious blog problems (such as my not being able to post) appear to be resolved, that doesn't mean that everything is peaches and cream here at ScienceBlogs. Apparently the servers have been getting slammed by spammers attempting to deluge us with comment spam. Consequently, we have all been asked to tighten our security up. That is why a valid e-mail address is required to comment here. Don't worry. Neither I nor ScienceBlogs use the e-mail address for anything other than comment verification. If you ever have reason to suspect otherwise, let me know, and, like Chad, I promise to find out what's going on. If your suspicions turn out to be justified, I'll raise holy hell. Hopefully the spam flood will decrease and this restriction will no longer be necessary. In the meantime, if it bothers you too much, you can always get a throwaway e-mail account from places like Hotmail or Yahoo!. (If you're a regular from the old blog, I'll even send you an invitation to Gmail if you ask me nicely--at least as long as I have invitations left to give and as long as you're not a regular troll from the old blog.)
If it gets worse, I'm told that we may have to require TypeKey verification of everyone. I would truly hate that. If that were to happen, I might go as far as to post links to my ScienceBlogs posts over at my old Blogspot blog, to allow anonymous comments.
One other issue is that it's been difficult for some people to comment. If for some reason you find that the system won't let you post a comment, try deleting all ScienceBlog cookies and try again.
Finally, like PZ, I'm willing to hear bug reports or usability issues. You can post them here, and I will forward them to the webmaster/developer in charge of ScienceBlogs and the Seed Magazine website.
Comments
testing, testing, 1-2-3
Posted by: coturnix | February 21, 2006 11:38 PM
It's been fine for me. No problems to report.
Posted by: Ali | February 22, 2006 12:33 AM
Well, it looks like if I actually read the instructions (delete cookies) I can do these things. That's what comes from following an old rule of my college roommate: "First step, burn the instructions!"
Posted by: Mark Paris | February 22, 2006 10:08 AM
It seems that using a Mac and Safari, I have to delete the scienceblog cookies fairly regularly in order to post comments.
Posted by: Mark Paris | February 22, 2006 3:44 PM
Is all well... just checking.
Posted by: HCN | February 22, 2006 4:28 PM
Ah, yes... it worked just fine. And I actually do check that email address once in a while. It is a valid address, just not the one I use for normal correspondence.
Posted by: HCN | February 22, 2006 4:29 PM
"...and there's one thing I've learned:
Burn the books!" -Brian
Posted by: BronzeDog | February 22, 2006 4:51 PM