Hello, folks. A number of you have mentioned that you’re having problems commenting. There’s a reason for that.

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.

As I mentioned previously, Unreasonable Faith sometimes runs guest posts as a service to our friends and fellow bloggers (and as a way to get out of writing a post for a day.)

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.

I see that our good hosts at Patheos have us linked off of their main page. They don’t seem to have us classified on their blogs page yet, likely because we’re just to unique to be classified. (‘unique’ may or may not be a euphemism here.)

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.

Sorry about the downtime, folks. Daniel has been having problems finding a host what can handle the traffic we generate.

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.

I’ve got to ask. This has been bugging me for a while.

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.