It’s been two months now since I started the Bad Behavior project. I’m stopping for a moment to take a look back to see how far it’s come, and to glance at the journey ahead.
In case you somehow don’t know what I’m talking about, let me fill you in. Bad Behavior is PHP-based software which blocks automated link spam. And link spam is the growing problem of spammers taking advantage of blogs, wikis, forums, guestbooks, CMS, and similar software to post spam. Link spam has been a serious problem for a couple of years, and many people have tackled it with varying degrees of success.
Continue reading ‘Punishing Bad Behavior’
Bad Behavior 1.1.2, the latest version of the Web’s only portable link spam killer, has been released.
Fixed in this release:
- Due to recent changes made by Microsoft, MSNBot was being blocked about 70% of the time. This has been fixed.
Changed in this release:
- A very surprisingly large number of people wanted to have individual
bad_behavior_log tables for each installation of WordPress, MediaWiki, Geeklog, etc., rather than a combined table. This is now supported and Bad Behavior will create a table using the table prefix provided by each individual software. This means, for instance, instead of a bad_behavior_log table, you will have a wp_bad_behavior_log table on WordPress, or a mw1_bad_behavior_log table on MediaWiki. The table prefix, of course, will vary depending on the settings of the software on which Bad Behavior is installed. The old combined bad_behavior_log table will be left in place; you will need to rename or remove it yourself if you desire.
I’m also moving closer to having the Geeklog port stabilized and included in the mainline Bad Behavior release. Currently it is built and distributed separately.
Thanks again to everyone who has written me, and written on their own sites, about their successes with Bad Behavior. It’s that time again, so Download Bad Behavior now!
Bad Behavior 1.1.1 has been released.
Did you ever do something really stupid? Well, I have. And I even did it yesterday. I released some software without completely testing it and getting rid of all the bugs.
I unfortunately made a stupid error in one of the Bad Behavior filenames, which was causing some PHP warnings for some people. This has been fixed. I also have fixed a problem with msnbot being blocked which isn’t my fault at all; it turned out that Microsoft changed the IP address ranges that msnbot uses right as I was preparing Bad Behavior 1.1 for release.
Go get your fix: Download Bad Behavior now.
See also the permanent page for Bad Behavior.
Security Update: All users should update to Bad Behavior 1.1 immediately to prevent malicious attacks of various types on your Web site.
Bad Behavior 1.1 is now available! It includes a number of fixes and improvements over the 1.0 series, including:
- Improved MediaWiki support. Bad Behavior now installs on MediaWiki the same as any other extension and no longer requires any unusual hacking. If you’re upgrading, please remove the hack from your
index.php file.
- Trackbacks and trackback auto-discovery from Movable Type blogs work normally now. In previous versions trackback auto-discovery and trackbacks received from Movable Type blogs would be blocked in certain circumstances.
- Extensive security audit has been completed and a wide range of security fixes have been implemented.
- Several additional spambots, some masquerading as well-known search engines, have been identified and blocked.
I would like to thank everyone who has downloaded and used Bad Behavior, as well as everyone who has made monetary contributions. Stopping link spam has turned out to be an interesting and engaging project, and promises to be so for some time to come, and your support helps.
I also want to thank a few contributors to the Bad Behavior project, but they wish to remain anonymous. So here is your thanks. Download Bad Behavior now!
