It’s the same setup as before, and your logins are the same.

Enjoy and thanks for being patient!

Update 9/30: There was an issue with some old users not being able to post, but that should be fixed now. Unfortunately, something else came up and the forum seems to be down. I’m at Patheos’ mercy and do not have the proper access to fix it myself. A blessing and a curse, I guess. :)

We’re getting inundated with comment spam at the moment, with several new spam comments coming in every second. The system is catching these and throwing them into the pending file.

The problem is that there’s something screwy with the IP detection. The system is reporting that many of these spammers share IP addresses with legitimate commenters. I’m not sure what’s causing this, but it means that the system thinks that some of you are posting repeatedly, which is causing the “you’re posting too fast” message to pop up. It’s even happened to me, which makes little sense.

I don’t know if this is specific to us or if it’s Patheos-wide. Regardless, hopefully we’ll get a handle on it soon.

UPDATE: Daniel replaced the default spam filter with the old system we were using before we moved to Patheos. That made all the difference. Everything seems to be functioning now.

If you have a essay that fits our focus on religion, science and skepticism, you are welcome to submit it. (this means you, LRA.) Not all submitted posts will be run, nor can we guarantee that the post will be run soon, but we’ll try to work with you and use most of what we get.

Posts should be no more than 1,000 words, and most should hover around 700 words. Posts of more than 500 words should be broken up with subject headings if possible. Don’t worry about providing html code, we’ll handle the formatting. We’ll also correct spelling and punctuations errors, but we’ll generally leave content alone. (That derisive snort you just heard came from the regulars. I’m a lousy proofreader, but I’ll try.)

For further instructions and advice, click on the submissions link under the blog header.

Well, greeting to those wanderers who have stumbled upon us here in our new digs. Let me explain a few things.

Patheos has mentioned the blog owner, Daniel Florien. That’s a cartoon image of his unshaven mug you see on the Patheos announcement. But there are a few more of us, although I suppose it’s possible that we’re all just voices in Daniel’s head. You can never be sure, can you?

Anyway, I’m Vorjack, a public historian and archivist in upstate NY. There’s also Custador, a nurse in Cardiff, Wales and Elemenope, an underemployed philosopher in Rhode Island. We also accept guest posts and have the occasional contributor.

Anyway, we’re not an extremely formal blog, but we’ve got a host of great commenters who’ve become part of the family. So feel free to poke through our 1,800 or so posts, then join in to the discussions.

Thanks to Patheos for taking us in. We’ve lost a few videos here and there, but otherwise it was a smooth transition.

The forum is down, but it should be up again sometime next week. If you’re suffering withdrawal, feel free to use this as an open thread until the forum comes back up.

Why are so many of you coming here looking for Pastor Melissa Scott?

It’s not just that Lorette’s post, Pator Melissa Scott, Porn Star, is the fifth most popular post on the blog.

It’s just that every day, at least a dozen of you get here by googling “Pastor Melissa Scott.” It’s not overwhelming, but it’s constant.

The most popular search term that brings people here is “unreasonable faith,” not surprisingly. But if you add up all the permutations of “pastor melissa scott porn star” and combine them, they exceed “unreasonable faith” as the most popular term.

WTF?

I don’t know what else to say, other than “Thank you, Lorette, for giving us such a popular post.” I’m not quite sure what you did, but it works.

Hugh Laurie and the Band from TV doing a somewhat atypical version of the folk standard “Goodnight, Irene.” More typical versions come from Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton and Sinatra. My favorite is that “little ol’ fella with his shiny guitar,” Mississippi John Hurt, and of course the baseline is the great Leadbelly.

So, yes, Hurricane Irene is headed up the coast. As of this writing, Albany is expecting torrential rains and high winds, which might take me off the network for a little while.

Exactly how bad it’s likely to be is hard to gauge. There’s a principle within American media corporations, which are heavily based in New York City, that the newsworthiness of an event is directly related to its proximity to the Big Apple. Since Irene is scheduled to pass over NYC, many stations are in freak-out mode.

So I may be out of touch for a few days. Feel free to treat this as an open thread.

The blog Skeptical Software Tools has an extensive story on the matter, tracing the case back to its roots. The mainstream media has even picked up on it – here’s CTV Montreal.

There’s just a couple of things I’d like to add. First off, Mabus/Markuze has not just been targeting atheist sites as has sometimes been reported. He’s also been seen at liberal Christian sites like Slacktivist and A Feather Adrift. He once nearly shut down Exploring Our Matrix.

Also, a number of people have noted that Mabus has been getting less coherent and more violent as time went on. You could actually see the downward spiral. Last year, PZ Myers commented:

Get on the google usenet archive — you’ll discover Markuze was actually a student at Concordia University in the early to mid 90s, so he’s almost certainly in his 30s to early 40s. It’s kind of sad, though: you can actually trace his descent into madness. His early posts are all normal inquiries and comments, largely on the comp.sys.* hierarchy, and he gradually becomes more ranty and unresponsive.

Someone could do an interesting psychiatric study on this guy just from the usenet archives.

As this progressed, I became more worried that Markuze would become a danger, perhaps to others but most likely to himself. There’s only one way for a downward spiral to end. Hopefully, Markuze will now be in a position to get the help he needs.

I’m not sure what we can do, since we’re hosted by WordPress. But if you are having this problem, or other problems with the home page, leave a comment here with a description of the issue you’re having and what platform you’re using. Since some people are having a problem with one computer and not another, let us know what commonalities there are. Maybe we can figure out a work around for the moment.

We lost about a dozen comments on the last post, and probably several more throughout. If you’ve written anything particularly witty over the past 24 hours, it may have disappeared.

Sorry about this folks. Hopefully this won’t happen again.