We had 10 minutes of downtime this morning as I was upgrading the site to the latest version of Drupal ( version 6.25). The update contained a whole bunch of security related fixes.
As I was upgrading the site I also installed the latest version of the text editor. Again mostly security related fixes + one feature I know some people will like. The editor now has spell checking! Also note that we are no longer accepting HTML formatted text to be pasted in to our text editor.
The Spam problem seems to be under control. Last year we had over 14000 spam attempts. Only 0.007% of these actually got posted on the site. This is less than 100! 98% of these got discovered within 1 hour of posting and deleted. A couple of weeks ago the welcome message on our sign-up page was changed to discourage spammers. This seems to have worked very well. A new feature I will be adding shortly is the hall of shame where the spammers will be posted with Name, IP, email and potentially postal address / country.
When we discover spam we always permanently ban (email + ip/subnet + username) of the spammer. Email and username is also banned using wildcard making it virtually impossible for the same spammer to try again..
As some of you have noticed we now have a g+ button on all our blogs and stories. If you feel that something is worth recommending to the rest of the world please click the g+ button to recommend the story. Please note that you must be signed in to you Google account for this to work.