The Web's premier link spam killer.
After many delays, technical difficulties, and much more, I’m finally pleased to announce that Bad Behavior 2.0 is taking shape and I have some downloadable code for you!
Continue reading ‘Bad Behavior 2 Alpha 1′
I’m finally making progress on getting Bad Behavior 2 debugged and in some sort of releasable shape. I was hoping to have it ready by now, but I had computer problems earlier in the week and spent most of a day and night working that out.
So I’ll be spending this weekend and probably Christmas Day working on Bad Behavior 2. Such is my life.
This is the third in a series of updates on the roadmap to Bad Behavior 2, the next major version of the Web’s premier link spam killer for PHP-based sites of all types.
The Bad Behavior API and callback layers are complete; the core code is now completely independent of the host application, which should make it much easier to port to other PHP-based systems. As proof of concept I’m developing an ExpressionEngine extension, in addition to the traditional WordPress plugin and MediaWiki extension. Other platforms should be able to get on board pretty quickly.
The first pre-release code should be out sometime this weekend, sleep and cash flow permitting. Those of you who are porting to other platforms will be able to work from this codebase with minimal or no changes through the final 2.0 release.
Remember, Bad Behavior is a user-driven project. If you feel that Bad Behavior has been useful to you and want to support its continued development, feel free to send along your holiday wishes. Yes, I know ’tis the season to max out the credit cards. Still, providing you with software that worries about spam so you don’t have to is what I do. And without your support, I’ll have to go do something else. (Thanks again to those of you who already contributed!)
This is the second of a series of updates on the roadmap to Bad Behavior 2, the next major version of the Web’s premier link spam killer.
I complained last time that I hadn’t yet received a copy of ExpressionEngine and wouldn’t be able to delay development of Bad Behavior much longer to wait for it. Well, this afternoon, the long-awaited beta copy of EE 1.4 arrived in my inbox, and so I’ll be spending the weekend looking at it and seeing what all needs to be done for a port.
Unfortunately, every host platform is somewhat different, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that installation for some platforms is going to be hairy at best, but compared to other plugins for those same platforms, about average.
I’ve had to drop the idea of using a PHP class for Bad Behavior’s tests, as it simply was too slow. Classes will still be used for certain host platforms that require them or where it will benefit, for the glue layer, but the core itself will be a set of callable functions.
I have been able to reduce the number of global variables used, though; the only thing global that’s particularly needed are the server globals anyway. Everything else can be passed around. This carries a slight performance penalty, but it’s much cleaner code, and you won’t notice a few microseconds here and there.
In other news, I’ve been busier than expected with trying to work on things that actually pay me money, of which Bad Behavior is only rarely such a thing. That also tends to delay development somewhat, as I generally don’t pull all-nighters anymore, for instance. 
I’ve also been tossing around the idea of creating an alternative to Akismet, Matt Mullenweg’s commercial spam screening service. Because the API is open, anyone could (assuming the proper know-how) create their own service that talks to the Akismet plugin.
It isn’t all that hard to set up such a service, but as Matt found out, it does have to be funded somehow. So he went with a commercial model based on obtaining WordPress API keys… I can’t do that.
So if you’re interested in seeing a noncommercial Akismet replacement service, click here.
Anyway, I’m preparing to spend most of the weekend working on Bad Behavior. Feel free to leave your comments below. Nice holiday wishes are appreciated, too. After all, most of you missed my birthday…
If you’re one of the few people still using the Proxomitron proxy server, you’ve probably already noticed that you can’t access a large — and growing — number of sites on the Web.
Proxomitron was an HTTP proxy, primarily for Internet Explorer, which filtered out pop-up windows, malicious JavaScript and the like. Its author stopped supporting it two years ago, and one year ago its author died and took the source code with him, thus making future updates to the product impossible.
Unfortunately, Proxomitron contains a bug which causes it to be blocked by Bad Behavior, even when accessing a site placed on the program’s “bypass” whitelist. Under normal circumstances, I would contact the author and advise him of the problem, and a fix would be out shortly thereafter, but this isn’t possible for Proxomitron.
Unfortunately, Bad Behavior cannot detect the use of Proxomitron, and thus there is nothing I can do; Proxomitron users will, if they continue using it, continue being blocked by Bad Behavior, and continue to find themselves locked out of a growing number of sites.
Since the final release of the product two and a half years ago, a product has appeared on the Internet which makes Proxomitron obsolete. That product is called Firefox.
All users of Proxomitron should immediately stop using it — and Internet Explorer, which was the only reason to have Proxomitron in the first place — and install Firefox. Then look through its incredible list of extensions to find just the ones you need, like the JavaScript blocker, Adblock, Session Saver, and many more.
And if you still need an HTTP proxy, consider using Privoxy, which is open source, well-supported, and (when not deliberately misconfigured) passes Bad Behavior just fine.
I’ve received several reports that the crawlers used by Syndic8 and PubSub are being blocked by the latest version of Bad Behavior.
The denial message reads, Header ”Pragma” without ”Cache-Control” prohibited for HTTP/1.1 requests.
(This is part of a series of new tests for spambots which claim to use the HTTP/1.1 protocol but actually do not do so properly.)
The trouble has been traced to a problem with those particular bots, and Syndic8 and PubSub have been notified.
Until they are able to fix their bots, you can add them to Bad Behavior’s whitelist.
Update: If you’re being blocked by Bad Behavior, don’t comment here. Read this.
The latest version of Bad Behavior, the Web’s premier link spam killer, has been released.
This is a maintenance release which fixes two problems which have recently come to light:
It’s that time again, so download Bad Behavior now!