Technical difficulties

As many of you may have noticed, we're having some technical difficulties, with prolonged posting times for comments, errors, etc. I assure you that, however much it might annoy you to watch your browser chug away slowly and seemingly endlessly after you've composed your pithy and erudite comment and hit "Post," only to deliver an error message at the end, it annoys me infinitely more because it's happening to me nearly every time I try to edit or save a post or comment and has been for several days now.

I've learned that what's going on is tha apparently traffic at ScienceBlogs has finally reached the point where it's starting to outpace our server's ability to handle it. This makes sense to me, as I've noticed that those annoying "500 Server Errors" happen much less frequently at night and on the weekends, but are nearly constant if I try to access Movable Type during a weekday. Our tech guru has put in a proposal to increase our server capacity to deal with this growth in traffic, but it could easily take a week or two before the new capacity is online. In the meantime, if, after hitting "Post," you see your browser chug for a long time and then return with an error message, please do one thing for me: Wait a minute or two; then open another browser tab or window and see if your comment has actually posted. Most of the time when one of those errors pops up, your comment did actually go through, even though it's quite natural to thnk that it did not. Do not--I repeat, DO NOT--hit your browser's "Go Back" button and then hit "Post" again to resend it. That is the reason why so many comments are appearing as duplicates. Please: Check first to make sure your comment isn't there before trying to resend it. I do go into Movable Type every now and then and try to delete duplicate comments, but when there are a lot of duplicates I make no guarantees that I won't make mistakes. Remember, when I hit "delete," often Movable Type chugs away endlessly for me, too, putting me in a cranky mood

PZ has more about this problem.

And, until our new server capacity comes online, try to hang in there. I know these glitches are annoying, but they are indicative that the we at the Seed collective are spreading our tendrils throughout the blogosphere, the better to spread science to the masses.