Blog Tweaking

A couple of technical notes that may affect your reading and commenting experience:

1) The site developer has tweaked the RSS feeds to include links to the full post, and to the comments section. The comments links on some posts even appear to give a comment tally, which is pretty cool. Of course, implementing this may dump a huge number of old posts into your RSS feed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

2) The ScienceBlogs servers have been getting whacked by spam the last few days, which has led to some very sluggish loading, and some commenting problems. The development team (all one of him) is working on this, but they’ve asked that we turn on email authentication for comments (up to this point, an email address has been optional).

The comment script will now require a valid email address be entered in order to comment. This will not be made publically available, nor will it be used for anything other than as an anti-spam measure. If you find otherwise, send me an email, and I’ll raise hell with the powers that be.

Turning on email authentication may also cause some difficulty in commenting, due to something having to do with cookies. If you have commented before, and the system won’t let you post a new comment, try deleting your cookies, and see if that fixes it. If you haven’t commented before, why don’t you test it out by casting a vote for the Greatest Physics Experiment?

(Polls will close at 5PM Eastern time Thursday evening, and then I’ll stop annoying you with exhortations to vote…)