…and this is a 
Pharyngula has a spam filter to keep out undesirables, and I do use it to block some of the more tedious or nasty denizens of the internet. In the interest of being completely transparent about it, I'm listing here the current residents of the Pharyngula filter file, other than the long list of spambots. For another example of this sort of action, I'll refer you to the infamous Tim Skirvin's Killfile Dungeon, an old institution on usenet, in which Skirvin announced the list of usenet commenters he had as entries in his personal killfile, which meant he wouldn't be reading them.
My killfile is more powerful. Being entered here means your comments won't make it to the pages of Pharyngula, and no one will see them. Just to be fair, though, if such people have a web page or blog of their own, I'll note it here. You can go elsewhere to read their foolishness, but you won't find it on Pharyngula.
By the way, if you want your own personal killfile for your browser, try Daniel Martin's killfile script for Firefox.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
What gets people put into the Pharyngula killfile dungeon? This is a list of annoyances; it usually takes more than one incident to get thrown in the slammer, though. The people who've been incarcerated are typically persistent and have a known history of pulling these stunts over and over again.
| Concern trolling | A particularly annoying form of trolling in which someone falsely pretends to be offering advice to favor a position they do not endorse; a creationist who masquerades as someone concerned about the arguments for evolution as an excuse to make criticisms. |
| Godbotting | Making an argument based only on the premise that your holy book is sufficient authority; citing lots of bible verses as if they were persuasive. |
| Insipidity | A great crime. Being tedious, repetitive, and completely boring; putting the blogger to sleep by going on and on about the same thing all the time. |
| Morphing | Changing pseudonyms to avoid killfiles. |
| Slagging | Making only disparaging comments about a group; while some of this is understandable, if your only contribution is consistently "X is bad", even in threads that aren't about X, then you're simply slagging, not discussing. |
| Sockpuppetry | Like morphing, but with a specific intent: creating multiple identities supporting a position to create a false impression of popularity |
| Spamming | Using the comments to sell real estate, mortgage assessments, little blue pills, porn, or Russian mail-order brides. Spammers are not tolerated at all; they are expunged without comment. |
| Stupidity | Some people will just stun you with the outrageous foolishness of their comments; those who seem to say nothing but stupid things get the axe. |
| Trolling | Making comments intended only to disrupt a thread and incite flames and confusion. |
| Wanking | Making self-congratulary comments intended only to give an impression of your importance or intelligence. |
Just for clarification: being a Christian or a Republican is not grounds for being banned, nor is disagreeing with your host. Try it, you can call me all kinds of names while praising Jesus and GW Bush, and I won't care…unless you turn it into a crusade and disrupt threads with constant iterations, of if you bore me by saying nothing else but jingo.
Index of the Banned
These are the people who have earned a place in the blog's filter settings. They are not allowed to post here any more, although some also have a predilection for morphing and sneak in now and then.
| Miscreant | Crime | Sentence | Comments |
| Larry Fafarman AKA Larry Farma, many others | Stupidity, Morphing | Automatically Junked | This fellow is probably mentally ill, but he's able to maintain a blog that is a bottomless pit of stupidity. Also banned at the Panda's Thumb. |
| Jason AKA Jinxmchue, Jinx | Slagging, Stupidity, Trolling | Automatically Junked | A Christian creationist who is a bit obsessed; has an anti-PZ blog, which is no crime here, but is indicative of his mentality. |
| Robert O'Brien | Stupidity, Stupidity, Stupidity, Stupidity, Trolling, Wanking | Automatically Junked | This fellow has an awesome reputation all over the web as one of the dumbest commenters ever. I concur. Has a stupid blog, too. Banned at numerous sites. Mocked everywhere. |
| John A. Davison | Stupidity, Wanking, Insipidity | Automatically Junked | A Legend. Has set up multiple blogs; each one consists of one post, inviting comments. Most of the comments are from himself. When he feels like that blog is "full", starts another one. Here are some links, and a perfect parody of his style. |
| VMartin AKA Huslista, jenik, janko, anodano, Pjetiir, DobzhanskyisInvalidFly, Pjeter, pjotr, FRANK2, SKAS, skuska, deletedtext, John's friend, ForbiddenTruth, anti-darwinians, Peppered-antimoth, CharlatanDarwin, Anti-darwin, skusto, zakazaneovocie, and others | Stupidity, Insipidity, extreme Morphing | Automatically Junked | A John A. Davison sycophant. Tried reposting Davison screeds after they were deleted; basically talks about nothing but Davison, bringing up his name in irrelevant threads. They belong in the dungeon together, sharing a cell. VMartin has lately increased his activity, morphing at a frantic pace to try and get past the filters—he's exceeded Charlie Wagner's efforts, hard as that may be to believe. He has also done something particularly contemptible: using other people's username and email address to try and sneak past the filters. Saddest, most pathetic part of it all: he's still only doing it to write sycophantic praise of John A. Davison. I think he needs to get a real room with his idol. |
| Hoody AKA DemolitionMan | Slagging, Insipidity | Automatically Junked | Tiresome one-liner troll who regularly buzzed in with stupid short whines. Has his own blog, if you like that sort of thing. |
| Drew A. Hempel AKA Dru | Insipidity, Morphing, Wanking | Automatically Junked | Space cadet from the U of Minnesota. Tends to make long-winded New Agey rants that everyone ignores; gets angry that we do not pay attention to him. May slip through now and then since he does like to change pseudonyms. |
| Charlie Wagner AKA Little Blond Girl, Militant Agnostic, many others | Wanking, Morphing, Stupidity, Insipidity, Spamming | Automatically Junked | Weird anti-evolutionist with delusions of intelligence. Commonly popped up in response to any science post to claim that it showed evolution was wrong. I put up with him for many years; when he rejected my request to make only constructive comments in a particular thread, he defied me and posted the same insult repeatedly, and then insisted it was his privilege, went on a morphing spree, and threatened to spam the site every time my back was turned. Complete ass. |
| The Kansas Troll(s) AKA too many pseudonyms to list | Slagging, Stupidity, Morphing | Disemvoweled on sight | Frantic morpher(s); I don't know how many there are, and there could be just one guy. Anti-evolutionist fanatic(s) spawned out of the creationist chaos in Kansas; cut their/his/her/its teeth on the KFCS forums but have since moved on to plague many science blogs with fly-by one-liners cussing out science, evolution, atheism, etc. |
| Susan Williams | Godbotting, Insipidity | Automatically Junked | Fueled the longest comment thread on the old site with repetitive apologetics and bible verses. When she found her way here a while back and promised to do the same thing, I threw her out. |
| J.J. Ramsey | Slagging | Automatically Junked (eligible for parole in 2008) | Wouldn't normally have been subject to banning, but chose to insult my daughter here, several times, after being warned. If you must insult my family, do it to their faces so they can kick your ass; it's cowardly to try and do it in front of me. |
| Yamil Luciano AKA A Good Christian Man, Weapon of Mass Instruction | Slagging, Godbotting, Stupidity, Morphing | Automatically Junked | An appalling far right-wing Christian bigot who repeatedly declared that the students at my university (all secular universities, actually) were STD-infected whores, among other pleasantries. Another obsessive; has a blog at pharyngulatopics.blogspot.com. |
| Swiftee | Slagging, Stupidity, Insipidity | Automatically Junked | Illiterate thug. Has a blog at Pair 'o Dice (yes, that's how he spells it). |
| Alexander Vargas | Slagging, Insipidity | Automatically Junked | He's been banned before, but like Charlie Wagner , believes it is his right to post on Pharyngula. Can be sensible, but prone to obsessive fits where he can't do anything but constantly slag people for being "Dawkinsites" or "Dawkobots". |
| cmf AKA skinfixxix, newKosfan, and austingrrrrl | Stupidity, morphing, sockpuppetry | Automatically Junked | Rambling nutcase and misogynist. Exhibited his incoherence and obnoxiousness on a thread, got disemvoweled, and then invented a few transparent pseudonyms to try and continue; "austingrrrl" even tried to claim that cmf had "sent" her to the thread. It's funny how even all of his female friends sound like woman-hating schizophrenic dorks. |
| Scotty AKA davescot (not the real thing), many other aliases | Stupidity, morphing, slagging, insipidity | Automatically Junked | Weird troll who showed up and posted nothing but links to soft-core images of women with large breasts, and obsessed over having sex with celebrities. Thrown into the dungeon because he's too pathetic to have out in public. |
| Mr G | Insipidity, trolling, wanking | Automatically Junked | Tiresome pseudo-intellectual who popped into a thread about the mind-body problem and started insisting…what? Nobody knows. He was darned sure his opinion was superior to everyone else's, but we couldn't get him to explain what his position was. Maybe a few years in the dungeon will give him time to organize his thoughts. |
| philos | Being a demented fuckwit and world-class asshole | Automatically Junked | In an unbelievable act of crass, vile smugness, this petty twerp rushed to my site after the fatal 35W bridge collapse to sneer at atheists. "Contemptible" isn't a strong enough word for vermin like this, who use tragedy to push their lies on the bereaved. His kind are what make me despise religion. |
| Caledonian | Insipidity, trolling, wanking, slagging | Automatically Junked | Years of smugly tedious comments from this obsessive passive-agressive whiner are enough. The guy puts up 25-30 comments a day, all calculated to annoy and fuel long drawn-out threads where he offers nothing but snideness — he's nothing but a bitter noise-maker who poisons discussions. |
| island | Insipidity, stupidity | Automatically Junked | Boring crank. |
| ForTheKids, FtK | overwhelming creepiness | Automatically Junked | I put up with this slimeball for a long time, since she rarely commented on Pharyngula; her wretched insinuations against my daughter, though, were too much. I think her pseudonym of "For the Kids" means she likes to prey on younger people with her lies and innuendo. |
| Jamie | Trolling, slagging, insipidity, stupidity | Automatically Junked | Strange little ranter who exhibited petty temper tantrums over poetry, of all things, which he thinks no true scientist should enjoy. Self-confessed troll; claimed to be leaving, but of course he couldn't stay away, so I'm helping by throwing him in the dungeon for a time-out. Yeah, he seems to about 12 years old, and spoiled. |
| William Wallace | Insipidity, stupidity | Automatically Junked | Extremely tiresome whiner. Insisted on telling me over and over again about the actual events that transpired at the screening of Expelled, never mind that I was there and he was not. Also banned at the Panda's Thumb. |
| dsmvld | Insipidity, stupidity, slagging, trolling | Automatically Junked | Obsessive loser; typical comment would be a sneering one-liner, and he would never discuss anything of any substance. The pseudonym is a dead giveaway that we're dealing with a troll. |
| Joe Blow | Insipidity, stupidity, slagging | Automatically Junked | Another brainless one-note. Never contributed to the discussions, just showed up to make sneering remarks … thrown in the dungeon for excruciating tiresomeness. |
| PlanetKiller, AKA "James", "Bob" | Insipidity, stupidity, slagging, morphing | Automatically Junked | Creationist with a chip on his shoulder. Final straw: showing up on my blog to tell me to leave. That's just too stupid to bear. |
| Hugh Slaman | Stupidity | Automatically Junked | Persistent world-class stupidity. An astonishingly obtuse dimbulb — he had to go. We do have standards on Pharyngula. |
| David Mabus | INSANITY | Automatically Junked | Deeply deranged, disturbed individual who believes James Randi has cheated him out of a million dollars, and who vents by spamming websites and email with his angry tirades. Certifiable. Needs immediate mental health care. His real name is Dennis Markuze, and he lives in Montreal, Canada. |
| Some Dude | Slagging, insipidity | Automatically Junked | Yet another angry kook. Blew in one day and started accusing everyone of a liberal bent of being PZ Myers' sockpuppet (it's not clear that he even understands what "sockpuppet" means). Sounded an awful lot like Joe Blow, and had to be incarcerated for the same reasons. |
