Bad Behavior 2.2 RC3 (2.1.15)
October 10th, 2011 by Michael Hampton
Bad Behavior 2.1.15 has been released. For 2.1 users, this is a maintenance release and upgrading as soon as possible is recommended. Legacy 2.0 users should make migration plans as soon as possible.
This release is the third release candidate for Bad Behavior 2.2 and should be safe to use on production sites.
Please note: The 2.0 series of Bad Behavior is receiving limited updates, including unblocks, bug fixes and security fixes only.
Who should upgrade?
All users should make plans to upgrade from 2.0 at this time. People who are porting Bad Behavior to other platforms should finalize any necessary changes to their ports.
What’s new?
New in this release (since 2.1.13):
- A version 2.1.14 was pushed to WordPress users without notice or announcement. While the software is in release candidate status, it should have had a prior announcement and documentation for the large number of changes from 2.0. Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience. Full documentation is forthcoming.
- New IP address ranges for Google and Yahoo!, which were previously unused for crawling, have been added to Bad Behavior.
- Once a request is determined to be from a search engine, all further checks are skipped.
- Requests from Internet Explorer 6 which are blocked due to a long standing bug in that browser are now blocked only when Bad Behavior is in strict mode. (Users of IE6 should make plans to upgrade as soon as possible, and should have done so years ago.)
- WordPress only: A bug in the built-in log viewer causing the wrong requests to be shown in some circumstances has been fixed.
- WordPress only: Calls to some deprecated WordPress functions have been rewritten.
- The URL whitelisting feature now accepts partial URL matches. This was necessary for compatibility with certain shopping cart plugins.
- Bad Behavior is now licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, either version 3, or at your option, any later version.
What’s coming?
I’m currently preparing to release the next major stable release of Bad Behavior, version 2.2. This release is sufficiently different that anyone maintaining a port needs to update their port to handle the new features immediately (such changes are backward compatible if implemented properly).
At the moment, barring any major bugs, this release will be 2.2. The last thing remaining to be done is documentation; this somehow always turns out to be a larger job than the actual code. I will be updating the online documentation over the next days as my time permits.
Download
Download the latest release of Bad Behavior now!
Support
If you’ve been here more than a few months, you’ve noticed that this release has been very long delayed. The primary reason for this is that, like most of you, I have to spend my days making money, and can only devote spare time to this project. Unfortunately my spare time is quite limited; I only get to spend more time on this when the community of Bad Behavior users want me to do so enough to put actual money behind it. Then it becomes “money making” and I can actually do significant work on it.
What’s more, I have a lengthy to-do list for a major rewrite which, if it ever gets done, will be Bad Behavior 3.0. I’m excited about it but I have no time to devote to it. This is doubly unfortunate because one of my favorite things in the world is beating spammers to within an inch of their…I mean giving them a quick clean…excuse me. Stopping spam. That’s it.
As I put the finishing touches on 2.2, get the documentation written and prepare it for final release, I’m asking you to decide how much time you want me to spend on this. What is it worth to you? Donate now to ensure that I can continue development and find new ways to frustrate spammers.