Folks, your not-so-trustworthy administrator failed to update one of the side programs for this blog when he updated the basic software. So, the polls haven’t worked right recently. Thanks to those who let me know (through public and private channels). I’ve updated the polling software and I think it’s right now.
Please revisit What is Critical Thinking and cast a vote. If you voted earlier and now cannot vote again, please let me know.
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Spamdammit
As P. Z. Myers noted in a recent post, one of the plagues of blogging is handling the comment spam; not that Teach Effectively is anywhere nearly as popular as Professor Myers’ Pharyngula, but Teach Effectively does get hit with a lot of spam. People send robots to add comments to post for nefarious reasons such as less-than-honest advertising. Fortunately, there are ways to automate rejection of spam comments. In the year plus that I’ve been using it, a wonderful piece of software that I employ, Akismet, has protected the Teach Effectively from 61,654 spam comments (for the current number, check the total in the left sidebar).
When I compare the number of legitimate and spam comments, I get a signal to noise ratio of 0.0023193953. That makes Akismet a pretty valuable product.
Another valuable one is Bad Behavior. Whereas Akismet blocks comment spam, Bad Behavior stops robots from registering as users and, sometimes, from even reading the blog.
These are things worth employing.
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