Bad Behavior / Bad Behaviour

Bad Behavior 1.2 Release Candidate 1

August 8th, 2005 by Michael Hampton

The first release candidate for Bad Behavior 1.2 is now available. Bad Behavior, the bane of link spammers everywhere, has been strong and stable. I’ve added some new features and need your feedback.

• Bad Behavior now has whitelisting capability. Edit the file bad-behavior-whitelist.php to add any IP address ranges or user agents you need to whitelist for your particular site. (Note that search engine bots should not be whitelisted by user agent, but by IP address range, because spammers pretend to be search engine bots. Bad Behavior already passes all major search engine bots which behave properly.)
• The specific reason for blocking is now logged in the database. This will help in determining whether new robots should be blocked by Bad Behavior or not.
• Several additional spammers have been identified and blocked in this release.
• Bad Behavior now sends copies of spam received automatically for use in Bad Behavior Blackhole. If you don’t want copies of your spam sent in, edit bad-behavior-blackhole.php.

The spammers are starting to use some new techniques and variations on old techniques, and so every so often I must update in order to keep them at bay. Ye olde arms race. This one, however, is about to get much more escalated; as the Bad Behavior Blackhole matures and becomes ready, you should see link spam start to disappear all over the Internet, and especially on your own site.

This release works with MediaWiki, WordPress and in generic mode with any PHP script. It has not yet been updated for Geeklog.

Please test this new release of Bad Behavior and leave your feedback here, or for private feedback or spambot reporting, contact me instead. To report a spammer or inappropriate blocking, please send the records in the bad_behavior_log table in the database relating to the issue, which you can retrieve using phpMyAdmin. Update: I especially need reports of any spammer which manages to get past Bad Behavior at this point. Please send in any that you see. Thanks!

Oh, and don’t contact me about the YahooSeeker bot. It is misbehaving. And you likely don’t need it anyway; it’s only used for Yahoo! Shopping. If you do need to be listed on Yahoo! Shopping, you can whitelist it. The main Yahoo bot is called Slurp, and this is the one that puts you in Yahoo! It passes just fine.

Update August 11: Please see the newer version Bad Behavior 1.2 Release Candidate 3.