The Drupal project will have a booth at Hostingcon, August 10-12th, in Washington, DC. This is the second year we will be at hostingcon meeting with members of the Drupal community and talking to hosting providers. The booth will be staffed by Eric Mandell, from Blackmesh hosting, members of the DC Drupal community, and Drupal hosting providers.

After months of hard work defining goals, getting price quotes, setting priorities and building working teams the Association is ready to announce our 2009 budget. The Association is an all volunteer ran organization made up of and supported by the Drupal community and is excited to share our budget with the community. We want to keep you informed as to how your donations are being used.

I received word this morning that the Drupal Association has been awarded a booth in the .org pavilion. The Bay Area has a strong Drupal community and we anticipate have a good cross section of support from the local community to help staff the booth. But if you are planning to be at Open Source world, or you would like to help staff the booth, please feel free to sign-up to staff the Drupal booth.

The title is a German proverb which translates as "hit dogs bark" and means that people will react once they feel sufficiently threatened.

The proverb apparently applies to Phorm a UK company that wants to use Deep Packet Inspection to serve ads. They have been critizied for their plan, and I also wrote them a letter asking them to exempt drupal.org from their plans (besides an auto-reply no answer was received).

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.