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If we do our job right, most members here will have no idea how much spam we fight here every day. Normally it's not too much, just a dozen members who have spam links in their profile. But over the last week, DIY Drones, like most of the other networks hosted on the Ning platform, has been hit by the biggest botnet attack we've ever seen, with hundreds of fake member accounts being created every day to post Canadian pharmaceutical ads. The graph above, from this article, shows the rise of these botnet attacks in recent weeks.

The reason members shouldn't know anything about this is because of the heroic work of your 30 administrators and moderators, who have been manually banning these accounts and deleting the posts before they're published (that's why we moderate all posts). The posts can come at the rate of dozens per hour, so this is a big job; I just wanted to publicly thank the moderators, especially Morli and Thomas Coyle for their tireless work in fending off these bots.

Just to give you and idea of what they're dealing with, here is about 30 minute's worth of banned members from today (don't worry; I'm not invading anyone's privacy--those are all bots):

The good news is that Ning is putting in place measures to stop this. Every time we ban a member for spam, that information is propagated throughout the Ning system (they have more than a million network like DIY Drones) and if an account is banned on one network, it will be banned on all of them. But we're up against a botnet of millions of zombie PCs, so sometimes the bad guys get ahead.

Ning just posted the new tactics it will be putting in place to turn the tide: "We have the initial captcha for first time posters now and will be adding a temporary suspension too." Hopefully, this will start to take effect soon and our moderators can take a break. Until then, a huge thanks!