Bad Behavior / Bad Behaviour

Bad Behavior Blackhole

May 20th, 2005 by Michael Hampton

A few weeks ago I released the Bad Behavior software for preventing blog, wiki, forum and CMS spam, and it’s been successful far beyond my initial expectations. Like just about everything, it isn’t perfect, and while it isn’t the final solution or “silver bullet” for stopping this type of spam, it has made a big dent in the spam flow for sites that have installed it. Many sites using Bad Behavior have reported the level of spam reaching their site has dropped 99% or even 100%.

As I said, however, it isn’t perfect. It isn’t going to catch spam which is manually posted by a human being sitting at his computer using Internet Explorer and MultiProxy, for instance.

Enter the Bad Behavior Blackhole.

The Bad Behavior Blackhole is a realtime blackhole list which will record sources of spam so that they can be effectively blocked. It’s currently in the development phase, and you can watch its development progress at its own blog.

Also I should mention that while Bad Behavior and the Bad Behavior Blackhole are free for anyone to use, I do incur expenses in their development, testing, deployment and ongoing availability. That’s just the nature of the system we have right now. If you would like to contribute to the further development of Bad Behavior and Bad Behavior Blackhole, please donate $5 or more.