Bob Corker says Trump 'utterly untruthful president'

New U.S. ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft says she believes 'both sides' of climate science

I wasn't aware that science - real science - had more than one "side".

I also wasn't aware until I heard about this posting that the ambassador was married to a coal magnate.

Puerto Rico still stumbles in the dark a month after Hurricane Maria

Trump gives himself a '10' for Puerto Rico response

Keep the spotlight on this, folks...

(Starting the thread in Politics because I know it'll end up here eventually...)

Nearly 500 hand-made dolls, each representing a different missing woman, have themselves gone missing.

Even if this is simply a matter of them having been misplaced - they were last seen in February 2016 - it's still bad that they're gone.

They've been know to be missing since November 2016 (nearly a year ago), but this is just reaching the news now. Missing White Woman Syndrome strikes again...

Is anyone else seeing a yellow padlock as part of the thread icon for the current "cursed" thread? It only appears if there are unread messages in the thread. I first noticed it two days ago. The Mouseover says that it supposedly means that I have posted in this thread (which I have), but that is usually a dot and not a padlock.


Kilroy

So a good friend of mine is Michael Satran. He's one of just a couple of people writing now for Hero System.

He's also sick right now. A couple weeks ago he collapsed in his driveway. For a couple months beforehand, he'd been having troubles: developed a facial tic, worried about random things, and having attention span issues. For those of you who read this, you probably have an idea about what's going on.

He's got a brain tumor.

The most recent report today is that now he's sleeping all the time, he's almost nonverbal, and when he's awake he doesn't recognize people are there. They're talking about moving him from where he is to a different facility, like Sloan-Kettering.

The man who never could shut up isn't able to speak. The man whose life was gaming and writing can no longer read.

I'm going to be moving soon, I hope, to be closer, and also to be running some games while Mike's unable to.

What a Goddamn time.

... why's Google rating a thread?

...our first attempt by a spammer to register.

I think everyone here will agree that one of the advantages of having a community with some 15 years' history behind it is that (at least at this stage in the life of the new site) everyone here is familiar, and everyone who is likely to register in the short run will be from the increasingly small group of those who haven't caught up to the move yet.

Also, most everyone who hangs out here has a handle, or just uses their real name.

So when I see a registration request from someone who uses an email as their username, and that name is unfamiliar, I'm immediately suspicious.  Fortunately the registration approval screen includes IP addresses, so I grabbed theirs and plugged it into the IP Check feature over at StopForumSpam.com.  Yup, sure enough, an IP used by a known spammer.  Just to be sure, I searched on the address itself, "christianadesouza@yahoo.com", and discovered that Chrissie there is a polyglot linguist with an amazingly broad range of interests, judging by the boards she's signed up for all over the world in the last couple months.

Sorry, Chrissie, we're just not capable of sustaining discourse at the level to which you are clearly accustomed.  For your own good, you understand, I must deny you access to the DW Forums.

Minor thing really, but the forum head page forum stats is not presented very well.  e.g.

Board Statistics
11,804
Total Threads156,525
Total Posts
127
mephron
22

This morning, just a few moments ago, the status report at the bottom of the top page (that at least I see, I don't know if it's visible to other people) reported that at that moment, using the board were me, four registered users, Bing, Google -- and 9 unregistered guests.  And none of the IPs for the guests popped up on the web-based antispam database that MyBB can be (and is, here) configured to interface with.  (Although two were locally recorded as having been used by registered users in the past.)

Usually when I see a high number of guests, at least a few of them are viewing the "no permissions" page, which tells me they're likely spammers.  And indeed, IP checking in those cases usually turns up at least one bad actor in the database.  But today's unusually "clean", which makes me wonder, do we actually have that many legitimate unregistered readers?  If so, wow.