Turn over in the Drupal association board and general assembly

By Amazon on

A few weeks ago a community member raised concern on the consulting list about turn over in the Drupal association, or rather the lack of it. Since this information is often public, but hard to track down, I thought I'd shed some light.

Ten people have rotated on and off the board of the Drupal
association. Only four original board members are still present.
The board has two new members as of 2009 for the Drupal association, who were not previously permanent members of the association: Tiffany Farriss and Cary Gordon.

Speedy google bot

By Gerhard Killesreiter on

Googlebot is a frequent visitor(*) of drupal.org, eating over 50GB of traffic in over 11 million requests in March. I didn't know that the postprocessing is also quite fast.

Today, one of our helpful users reported some spam which was created by a new user. The user was a member for 2 hours and the spam itself was just over 1 hours old before I deleted it.

After I deleted it, I thought that it would have been entertaining to show it to somebody (the subject of the spam was hardware for your shower) and I decided to look in google. I didn't really expect it to be there, but there it was "found one hour ago". That means that googlebot picked it up within the first few minutes after its creation and it was in the search results shortly afterwards. Considering the huge amount of websites that googlebot looks at I find this pretty impressive.

⋅ Categories: drupal.org, spam, google

Spammers read my blog

By Gerhard Killesreiter on

Maybe they don't but they have realized that their spam profiles on drupal.org are too short-lived to get them much traffic. As a result of this, the number of new spam profiles seems to be down.

As a side note: In part due to the spam profiles and the google traffic that they generated drupal.org served more than 30 Mio pages in March. This is an increase of about 38% compared to February with 22 Mio viewed pages.

The bigger part of this surge can probably be attributed to DrupalCon at the beginning of March.

Here's a table of the number of 403 pages by month:

Month Count
January 66000
February 65000
March 110000
April (until 19th) 1.3 Mio
⋅ Categories: drupal.org, spam, drupalcon

Goodbye Phorm

By Gerhard Killesreiter on

After amazon and wikimedia the Drupal association has decided to opt out of the Phorm webtraffic snooping scheme. It is quite scandalous that one has to opt-out instead of having the option ot opt-in, but we did it anyway. We got the same auto-reply that wikimedia got, let's see if we get any more detailed response later.

⋅ Categories: drupal.org, privacy

Why spam works

By Gerhard Killesreiter on

I've recently been looking into the spam that hits drupal.org and yesterday I've finally found out why they do that and that it actually works. Until I block the accounts at least.

A blocked a account will give any visitor a "403 access denied" message. Drupal logs these incidents. It also logs the referer of these requests, so I am able to see which page the visitor was looking at when he clicked on the link to the blocked account. Most of these pages are search resulte of google and other search engines. And of course the visitor was looking for porn of all different flavours.

⋅ Categories: drupal.org, spam, porn

Spammer update

By Gerhard Killesreiter on

Last week I blogged about the spammers on drupal.org and how we remove their accounts. This week I've again looked at the newly created accounts and also added some other domains to the access rules (mainly aliases of mailinator.com).

There is one new player on the mail provider list. Apparently somebody created a domain to use for mail in order to be able to register at sites like drupal.org. And that they did: they created almost 500 accounts on d.o during the last week. They are of course all blocked now.

⋅ Categories: drupal.org, spam

Googlebot likes Drupal 6

By Gerhard Killesreiter on

It is now several weeks after the upgrade of drupal.org to Drupal 6 and I've taken a look at google's crawling statistics for drupal.org.

This is the most interesting graph for me as infrastructure manasger, it shows the average time that googlebot needs to download a html page from drupal.org. We apparently had a bit of a rough ride in January, but recently this has smoothed out. About 600ms per page seems quite a good value to me.

⋅ Categories: drupal.org, google, drupal 6

Spammers on drupal.org

By Gerhard Killesreiter on

So, after I claaimed we'd have less spammers than others, I wanted to find out how many spammers we've actually had.

mysql> select EXTRACT(YEAR_MONTH FROM from_unixtime(created)) as yearmonth, count(*) as count from users where status = 0 and login != 0 group by yearmonth order by yearmonth desc ;

Year/Month # of spammers
2009 / 04 820
2009 / 03 710
2009 / 02 1101
2009 / 01 371
2008 / 12 171
2008 / 11 145
2008 / 10 136
2008 / 09 268
2008 / 08 486
2008 / 07 639
2008 / 06 145
2008 / 05 132
2008 / 04 149
2008 / 03 206
2008 / 02 167
⋅ Categories: drupal.org, spam

Spammers by mailprovider

By Gerhard Killesreiter on

On drupal.org we have much less spammers than other websites. One reason is the fact that we do not allow anonymous users to post anything and that every user needs a valid mail address in order to use his account.

This poses the question: Which email providers to our spammers use?

Luckily, this is rather easy to answer:

mysql> select substring_index(substring_index(init, '@', -1), '.', 1) as provider, count(substring_index(substring_index(init, '@', -1), '.', 1)) as count from users where status = 0 and login != 0 group by provider order by count;

⋅ Categories: drupal.org, spam

Submit ideas for Drupal Association website

By webchick on

Now that the Drupal.org redesign is underway, Neil Drumm is currently collecting suggestions for what a revamped Drupal Association website might look like.

Angela Byron is collecting feedback and opinions from the Drupal community at http://webchick.net/node/58. Please post comments/opinions!

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