Adminstrative

Our webmaster was working with the server people to fix the 404 error that’s been coming up lately. Unfortunately, that temporarily deleted all our posts back to mid-July. We’re back up and running. –WmAD

If anyone whose comments have been showing up right away after submission is finding them being delayed or never showing up at all it’s probably because the third party service we use to keep spam (unwanted advertisements) out of the commentary is unpredictably flagging a lot of legitimate comments as spam. If it’s any consolation even authors and editors here (myself included) are getting comments held up for no discernable reason.

It’s hard to see in the graphs below because these are totals and February was a short month but the daily average number of unique visitors increased from the January all-time record of 5828 to 6430 in February which is a 10% increase. Interestingly, the total number of unique sites jumped dramatically from 39217 to 49751. I’m not sure what that’s all about yet.

Kevin Wang and Peter Wagenet at ZeitStudios devoted their time and talents to revamping the Uncommon Descent blogsite. What an improvement it is! All of us who are part of UD are in their debt. As with all such upgrades, there are bound to be kinks that need to be ironed out. Please use this thread (or the previous one by DaveScot) to note any issues in the design of the site that need to be worked out. Thanks.

If something isn’t working right in the new layout with your browser, tell us here. Please include some information about your computer (Windows/Mac/Linux) and broswer (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Netscape) and anything else you think might be relevant in duplicating the problem. Thanks.

I received the following email from someone I will keep anonymous: Subject: blog entry on talk origins Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 12:35:41 -0500 From: snip To: Bill, we have met a few times and are clearly on opposite sides with regards to ID, but I think we are on the same side with regard to Christ (although I am a Mormon). For this reason I strongly think you should remove [the] blog entry on TalkOrigins google problem. First, it is mocking and exploiting talkorgins problems with a hacker. I have always hoped that the ID debate could happen more often at a higher level than that (I do criticize my fellow ID opponents when I feel that they also Read More ›

Since many IDEA members read this weblog and this could be a point of confusion for other readers, I wanted to clarify something. Thomas D. English is a part of the IDEA Center Advisory Board. Thomas M. English is the Tom English that frequents Uncommon Descent.
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Aside from setting new records in almost all categories June’s growth was larger than normal in that the total number of referring sites grew by over 20% month over month to 38,209. Growth in all other categories was our normal 10%. Way to go everyone! We continue to get our message out to more and more people! I wonder if Panda’s Thumb continued their decline? Maybe our loyal opposition will give us an answer at ATBC.

I’ve been lax in keeping the topic here on intelligent design and away from everyone’s favorite religion (or lack thereof). I’m as guilty as anyone. To remedy this situation I’m going to be deleting any comments I see with gratuitous references to religion until further notice. I’ll make an exception for any of our authors who’ve PhDs in both theology and mathematics. 😉 Update: I’ll make one other exception. You can make gratuitous comments are about Darwinism, the Godless Religion of the Left.

In the last 48 hours we’ve had almost 1000 comments attempt to be posted from sources in Europe (“Ripe Network” ISP in Amsterdam to be precise). They’re all promoting different kinds of insurance. This is at least an order of magnitude greater than the normal rate of spam (for perspective we’ve only had 10,000 spam comments total in the last year) and it’s too time consuming to sort through looking for legitimate comments so for the nonce I won’t be doing any more recovering of user comments from it – they’re simply being deleted en masse. For most of you this will have no impact.

I created some new Pages with links in the right column of the blog. Under Comment Policy are Moderation which is the moderation policy statements made by Bill Dembski and continued by his appointed Blog Czar and Put a Sock In It which is a partial list of boring arguments that earn deletion and if repeated an invitation to leave Uncommon Descent. Please be aware of them.

How WordPress Handles Moderated Comments

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I’m a bit aghast that some people here and elsewhere are offended that I will moderate commenters based on their behavior outside the Uncommon Descent blog.

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