Administrative

My Scienceblogs site is a-changin'. National Geographic has been working behind the scenes to convert and move all the old data to a newer and prettier website, and the final surge of fixes is going into place tonight and tomorrow — so don't bother commenting over there for a while until it's all stabilized. I suspect it will all go smoothly (and the new site is looking good) except for a little bit of drama. NatGeo has informed Abbie Smith that they want the ERV slimepit posts taken down, according to Abbie's own account on facebook. There are various accusations as well that it's us here at…

Given the content of my site, and the wingnutty pious predilections of the American public and government, and the enmity and known censorious habits of Christians and creationists, how long do you think this place would stay up if SOPA/PIPA went into effect?

People are still reporting that they can't see current content on the new site. The reason for this is that there was a temporary error in the code which told the browser to cache and essentially never refresh the page from the web. This problem has been corrected, but you've still got a bad copy of the page cached on your local computer, and it doesn't know that it's been fixed. I'm promoting a comment from David Marjanovic: Rick, you have the well-known cache problem. Refresh. If that doesn't help, try Shift+F5 or Ctrl+F5. If that still doesn't work, burrow through the menu of your browser…

I'm getting reports that a lot of you haven't seen anything new at Freethoughtblogs Pharyngula. I've been posting stuff there! Apparently, there's a glitch somewhere in caching, and it's not clear to me whether it's a problem on our end, or on your end — for some reason, your browser is loading an old cached copy of the page rather than the latest. Anyway, if you clear your cache (don't ask me how), you get to see the latest content. I'm hoping someone here can say what we can do to make this a more permanent fix.

Somehow, annoyingly, the DNS for freethoughtblogs got redirected to the bad old server, Bluehost, and all you see when you go there is a dead static page. Ed Brayton is scrambling to figure who screwed up what where and get it fixed as soon as possible.

The new site is suffering — the poor thing is just dying and struggling and screaming, trying to cope with the traffic. Say goodbye, Ed Brayton is going to put a bullet in its brain tonight, and it'll be dead. But good news! A brand new dedicated server is being installed tonight as well! There will be a brief transition in which all commenting will be shut down, and then the existing content will be whisked out of the old, clunky server and transferred to the swift and gleaming hard drives of a brand new machine. Then there will be a period of confusion as a new IP address must propagate out…

I was afraid this would happen. Trying to shift the bulk of the traffic from here to freethoughtblogs has not gone well: the server can't handle the load, so it's currently grinding away glacially to serve everyone and serving no one in the process. Everything will be moved to a sniny new server by this weekend, though, which should fix things. I hope.

Howdy all! This is MG Myers. Pharyngula is known for its vibrant community of commenters, and May was no exception. The May Mollies have been tabulated and the winner is <drum roll> Audley Z. Darkheart! Audley is hereby inducted in the distinguished Order of the Molly. Virtual champagne all around! As you are celebrating with the new inductee, be sure to leave the names of your June Molly nominations and the reasons for their selection in the comments. Hang on a moment…we can't be accumulating votes in two threads! Comments are closed here. Leave your votes at the new site.

We've discovered the problem that has flattened freethoughtblogs.com: our hosting company can't do it, despite what they told us. What we need is something that can handle hundreds of thousands of page loads per day and a good chunk of storage space, and these guys are throttling our bandwidth and strangling access right now…and they don't offer a more capacious option. What you can do to help is give us concrete recommendations for a better situation, either a Virtual Private Server or a dedicated host. Leave info, links, phone numbers, whatever in the comments, or email me so we can work…

Hey, gang! You may have seen a few hints that there will be some changes around here, semi-imminently. Any interruptions in service should be brief to non-existent, but I have some concerns that if the blog goes a-wandering or falls under new management, there will be some drop-off in traffic…and some drop-off in my revenues, which wouldn't break me — I have a day job! — but might negatively impact my payments on the secret nuclear submarine and my remote island lair. I talked to a few people this past weekend about merchandising, you know, succumbing to capitalism and peddling branded…

Stop writing to me about Mairson and Grossman. I have no respect for their opinions at all. Grossman is the religion columnist at USA Today; Mairson is some disgruntled ex-employee of National Geographic who has appointed himself guardian of all propriety of anyone associated with NatGeo. Grossman is wondering "if the august Society would try to rein in Myers, just let him quietly bear the coveted NGS brand or whether Myers would high tail it out from under editorial control." Mairson is concerned about my "profanity-laced diatribes and my lack of "civil discourse about religion". Bugger 'em…

Greetings! This is MG Myers. PZ is safely landed in Dublin, but he's going to be busy and jet-lagged for a while. Pharyngula is known for its vibrant community of commenters, and April was no exception. The numerous nominations have been tabulated and the winners are <drum roll> Dhorvath and raven! These two well-deserving and passionate commenters are hereby inducted in the distinguished Order of the Molly. Virtual champagne all around! As you are celebrating with the new inductees, be sure to leave the names of your May Molly nominations and the reasons for their selection in…

Howdy all! This is MG Myers. The competition for the March Mollies was mighty fierce with 23 great nominees. The votes have been tabulated and the winners are <drum roll> onion girl and CJO! These two well-deserving commenters are hereby inducted in the distinguished Order of the Molly. Woohoo! Weehee! Congratulations to both! Now we just need to catch up on the April awards. Who of your fellow commenters do you think is deserving of a Molly award for April and why? Also, in the last Molly thread Mattir had a terrific idea of starting a monthly book club. It would be good to…

Hi, this is MG Myers. A few readers mentioned that Pharyngula is three months behind in awarding Mollies. Shame on PZ. Since PZ doesn't have the job done, I thought maybe we should fire him help him out. Anyway, I'll be taking over the Molly administration. If you have any community building ideas we could do to make Pharyngula an even stronger and better community, feel free to put your ideas in the comments. For starters, let's catch up on inducting some well-deserving commenters in the distinguished Order of the Molly. The votes for February have been tabulated and the winners are <…

Just a warning: lately, there've been a lot of nasty, slagging, one-off comments coming in from Yahoo accounts — you know them, the usual unreadable smear of a name that we all call yahoomess. I'm considering cutting them off altogether. All it will take is one click and the yahoomesses will no longer be afflicting the site. If there is anyone who objects, speak now. If there are a significant number of reasonable people who are logging in with those IDs, and have managed to successfully generate a readable name for themselves, I'll reconsider.

I have news. Scienceblogs is going to be folded into a new organization sometime soon — basically, we've been bought. I can't discuss all of the details just yet, but let's just say it is a prestigious national magazine with a healthy bottom line that will do us a lot of good. There are certainly some advantages: like I said, prestigious, and there's also a commitment to up-to-date technology and migrating to better blogging software. There's also an agreement that the range of topics I discuss here, including the strong dissent from religion and the atheism and the anti-creationism stuff,…

Three and a half years is a pretty decent lifespan for a cuttlefish. The Cuttlefish Poet started out as a joke. I had posted about Cephalopod Awareness Days, including a cephalopod poetry contest, and just for fun, added a handful. I have my reputation to think of, so a quick nom de tentacle change was required. I honestly thought that would be the end of it. But then, Gary Aldridge made the news, and in the ensuing respectful, solemn thread, I was struck with a rhyme. So… why not let "Cuttlefish" make another appearance? So he did. This time, though, the reaction was overwhelmingly…

I know you're out there, and I'm laughing at you. Something happens to me occasionally: some clever dick decides that they'll torment me by signing me up for all kinds of internet newsletters and advertising, so that my in-box will get flooded, or they sign me up for magazine delivery and then presumably chuckle at my discomfiture at receiving unwanted mail. What they don't understand is that I live in spamville. I get several thousand emails a day right now. Putting me on an acupuncturist mailing list, or the newsletter of a chiropractic cult, simply throws a few more drops into the torrent…

The latest information from management on the impairment of service: We are still working to contain the ongoing DDoS attack, and to this end we have recently upgraded our service with Rackspace. This should restore access to our readers who have been blocked for the last week. However, some users may still be blocked, so please continue to send blocked IP addresses to webmaster@scienceblogs.com (or have them send us their IP addresses directly). As a preventative measure, please send your own IP addresses as well; we will add these addresses to Rackspace's whitelist. The problems should…

But we do have a little more information from Seed management. Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating from Turkey and Qatar, and until it stops, Rackspace must block IP ranges in order for the site to be accessible to anyone. They are also unwilling to manually unblock hundreds upon hundreds of individual IPs. They have advised that we invest in a firewall and additional services from them, but we are still working out what these will cost and how effective they will be. I am not sure if I was correct…