Bad Behavior Upgrade

Posted by Beth on June 29th, 2006 filed in Blogs, General, Pseudogeek stuff

Tags: spam, bad behavior, bad behaviour, wordpress, expression engine

I just upgraded to the latest Bad Behavior (beta) release. If you see anything wonky, let me know!

Here’s the Bad Behavior page, if you want to get it for spam blocking.

Here’s a quick rundown of the changes:

Trackback spam is pretty much dead. If you see a trackback spam get past Bad Behavior, I want to know about it.

Bad Behavior is stopping 99% or more of comment spam and an unknown amount of automated wiki vandalism. (I have no chicken to measure it.)

A check which required waiting five seconds before submitting POST requests has been removed. While it showed some benefit in stopping spam, it was unduly interfering with legitimate activity.

A check for misconfigured proxy servers has been disabled. While it blocked quite a bit of spam, it also blocks many corporate and government users, not to mention the entire country of Singapore. This appears to be a Microsoft ISA Server bug or misconfiguration, and when someone tells me how to fix it, this check will be re-enabled.

Several additional checks for spam and malicious activity have been added.

Database logging has been revamped, and the verbose option reinstated. When verbose is off, only blocked requests and some suspicious requests will be logged. On most requests, with verbose option off, Bad Behavior will make only one database query (to retrieve its settings).

On WordPress, the administrative screen has been expanded. You can now turn verbose mode logging on or off from this screen.

Once again, strangely enough it seems to be even faster than previous versions.

A couple other noteworthy things:

This will NOT work if you use GoDaddy for hosting. GoDaddy sucks!
ExpressionEngine: Targeted for next alpha/beta release.

I will be so happy to see it working on EE, so I can get it implemented for Sondra!

Finally, if you use Bad Behavior, you should consider supporting the project with a donation.

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5 Responses to “Bad Behavior Upgrade”

June 29th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Michael Hampton says:

My blog isn’t half bad either, if I do say so myself.

June 29th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
Beth says:

:mrgreen:

Just sent my donation to you, Michael!

I’d been getting slammed lately with the spam, and already I can see a difference!

June 29th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
Michael Hampton says:

Thanks! Anything I can do to get rid of that captcha with its constant stream of insulting four-letter words. :)