Archive for April, 2008

Documentation Update, Support

April 23rd, 2008 by Michael Hampton

I’ve finally gotten around to moving the Bad Behavior documentation from its former home to this more permanent site. I’ve also given it a bit of an update where I spotted things that needed updating.

In addition I’ve compiled the list of Bad Behavior ports that I’m aware of, with links to installation instructions and/or separate download pages where appropriate. I was quite gratified to come up with 10 different packages on which Bad Behavior now runs. There are probably more that I don’t know about.

Please check out the documentation and if you spot any errors or omissions, or if you know of a Bad Behavior port that I don’t have listed, let me know and I’ll fix them as soon as possible.

Second, every year or so I need to take the time to remind all of my (old and new) users of the nature of Bad Behavior as a personal project. As parts of the site hint at, I have yet more major development in the pipeline for Bad Behavior. Some of that development will make porting to new platforms easier, and some of it will make Bad Behavior an even more effective spam stopping tool. But all of this development has been delayed since I have to spend most of my available time on projects which pay the bills.

So Bad Behavior relies on contributions from its users to allow me to devote more time to Bad Behavior, rather than the other projects which usually pay the bills. Tens of thousands of people use Bad Behavior now, but the number of people who have contributed financially over its lifetime is fewer than 100.

For those of you who have used Bad Behavior and enjoyed not having ads for Viagra, poker, forex, and gawd knows what else for all this time, then by way of saying thanks, buy me a beer. :) Okay, you can’t do that online, so consider dropping off $5.00 or £2.75 or €3,50 instead. Or if you feel it’s really worth it, you can contribute more.

Your contributions will allow me to devote more time to further development of Bad Behavior. This is sorely needed because, despite the best efforts of the brightest minds on the Internet, spam isn’t going away anytime soon. (We just haven’t figured out how to deliver electric shock over the Internet yet.) This will allow me to spend time on solving your spam problem so you don’t have to.

I’m also going to get the roadmap updated sometime in the next few days so that everyone knows where Bad Behavior is going in the future. Bad Behavior began as a personal crusade to stop spammers on my own site, and as long as there are spammers, it will continue, hopefully with your help and support.

Bad Behavior 2.0.15

April 21st, 2008 by Michael Hampton

Make a Donation.

Bad Behavior 2.0.15 has been released. It is a maintenance release and is recommended for all users but especially for high-traffic web sites.

Who should upgrade?

Users of high-traffic web sites and low-capacity virtual private servers should upgrade to allow for disabling Bad Behavior’s logging features to improve site performance.

What’s new?

New in this release (since 2.0.14):

  • An option has been added to disable Bad Behavior’s logging feature entirely. The logging functionality, while it allows Bad Behavior to block more spam in certain cases, can degrade performance on certain high-traffic sites as well as poorly configured web servers and very low capacity servers such as some VPSs. Disabling logging may result in additional spam being received on your site.

Download

Download Bad Behavior now!

Support

If you find Bad Behavior useful, please consider making a financial contribution to its further development.

Bad Behavior 2.0.14

April 7th, 2008 by Michael Hampton

Make a Donation.

Bad Behavior 2.0.14 has been released. It is a maintenance release and is recommended for all users.

Who should upgrade?

Users of WordPress 2.5 or later should upgrade to enable the new Flash-based image uploader.

What’s new?

New in this release (since 2.0.13):

  • Shockwave Flash has been removed from the blacklist, since software that uses Bad Behavior (WordPress 2.5 and later) now includes Flash animations which access the software backend. Since some email harvesters use Shockwave Flash as a user-agent string, this may result in additional email spam being received if email addresses are exposed on your site.

Download

Download Bad Behavior now!

Support

If you find Bad Behavior useful, please consider making a financial contribution to its further development.