Bad Behavior / Bad Behaviour

Bad Behavior 1.2 Release Candidate 3

August 11th, 2005 by Michael Hampton

Bad Behavior 1.2 Release Candidate 3 has been posted. Bad Behavior stops link spam at the front door by denying spammers the ability to access your PHP-based web site at all.

As I close in on a final 1.2 release, the reports I have gotten have been quite encouraging. Most testers have reported a complete elimination of link spam to their sites. So I’ve cleaned up a bit, fixed one problem, and this will probably be the final 1.2 release, or very close to it.

New in this release:

• A bug in Opera causes it to be incorrectly identified as a spambot by Bad Behavior. The check has been temporarily disabled until I can confirm that Opera has fixed its browser.
• Bad Behavior no longer sends any data to the Bad Behavior Blackhole. This proved entirely unnecessary, as Bad Behavior appears perfectly capable of catching spambots on its own without outside help.

New since version 1.1.4:

• 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.
• When logging is turned on, Bad Behavior will identify spammers it has recently seen, even if their profile changes, and continue to block them.

Update 16 August: See Bad Behavior 1.2 release.