Where do they come from?

As a funny aside post, I've been getting more visits lately. Really, in the last month, I've seen a pretty large increase in what has been otherwise a relative trickle of traffic, compared to some of my science blogging compadres.

And where are these people headed? To this post. Yep, in the last month, 2/3 of my traffic is headed to my Leap Year Skeptics' Circle post. I admit, I was a little proud of that post. I like writing ironic, tongue-in-cheek stories for the Skeptics' Circle.

I was going to point out to Orac that the Skeptics' Circle had seen an upsurge in popularity, until I poked around a little further to discover *why* I'm getting all this traffic... It turns out, that as of a few weeks ago, my little blog shows up as the number one hit on Google image searches for sex (if you have safe search turned on - I rather doubt that I'm at the top of the heap if you turn off safe search). Go figure. Not quite the demographic that this post was aiming for, but what the hell. Hopefully they learn something while ogling the photo of this woman:



Edited for Brigit.

New commenting settings.

The number of commenters here at Conspiracy Factory seems to have increased. Previously, my level of traffic was low enough that generally I could tell the difference between anonymous commenter #1 and anonymous commenter #2. Now, I get a little schizophrenic reading the replies to each other where I can't tell who is who.

That said, I've turned off anonymous commenting, and suspect I won't be turning it back on in the near future.

So go ahead, go get yourself an account. Choose a pseudonym. You still get to be anonymous. But this way, I can tell you apart from other commenters.

Thanks,

-Factician

Edit: Nov 2007. I'm allowing anonymous commenting again, to increase the number of commenters. However, given some product spamming that I've been getting, I'm now moderating comments. If you're not selling garbage, or you're not being obnoxiously rude, your comments will get through.

Conspiracy Factory - now safe for work!

technical problems

Apparently some browsers on this blog are demanding a password when viewing this page. I'm not sure why it's doing that, because the website demanding the password isn't one I've ever even linked to. Just click cancel, and you can view the page without any trouble. Sorry for the inconvenience.

On bad behavior.

Rather than post my own thoughts on the issue of death threats on blog, I thought I would post the words of Bitch Ph.D., who says it better than I ever could:

"What needs to happen is that those of us who have a fairly weighty online presence need to say, in no uncertain terms, that threats and harassment and sexism and racism and homophobia and all that other offensive shit is flat-out unacceptable, both in real life and online. The best way to make that clear isn't to tell victims, publicly, that "if they can't handle it" they should quit blogging. Nope. Instead, those of us who provide readers with opportunities to respond--in blog comments, or on online forums, or in chat groups--need to make sure we come down hard on assholes who use those opportunities to hassle, harass, or threaten people (including us). For god's sake, don't make excuses for them by pretending that they're some kind of force of nature, like an earthquake, that we can't do anything about. Because we can, if we shut them down when they show up."

Though my own online presence is far from being "weighty", this is the policy I intend to operate here.