Good evening friends and fellow judges of the Great Quadrennial National Beauty Pageant, whose season is now upon us.

Now that the preliminary rounds are over and we roll inexorably on to The Marking of the Ballots, it seems that many are concerned about the appearance of shills showing up at our virtual doorstep attempting to work the judges like a horde of deranged, door-knocking religious fanatics seeking converts.

But seriously folks, let's have a talk about shills.

This is another in a series (goodness knows when it will end) of meta posts intended to discuss site issues and help folks who have recently arrived to orient themselves. For more help for new folks please click on the Welcome, New Members link.

This post will be kind of a mish-mash of issues. We'll start with this one:

Ok, maybe that's overstating it some.

In the past couple of weeks, a lot of folks have landed here at the site and we are very much scrambling to keep up. Many of the systems that we had in place that worked with a small site are less than optimal for the much larger site that we have become.