Bad Behavior protects WordPress.com
August 20th, 2005 by Michael Hampton
Running behind the scenes of Matt Mullenweg’s new commercial WordPress project, WordPress.com, is of course WordPress, everyone’s favorite blogging platform. And running on WordPress.com is Bad Behavior, the premier solution for blog spam.
Mullenweg attended the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco this week to promote WordPress.com as a corporate blogging platform competing with Six Apart’s TypePad service. WordPress.com is currently in an invitation-only phase as it ramps up to full service.
At the summit Mullenweg said one of the main features of WordPress.com, which will cause people to choose it over TypePad, is better spam protection. WordPress.com uses Bad Behavior as its primary line of defense against blog spam.
Bad Behavior works by analyzing the entirety of incoming HTTP requests to ensure that they match profiles of legitimate browsers, and don’t match profiles of known spammers. In addition to WordPress, Bad Behavior also runs on MediaWiki, Geeklog, and Drupal, and can be integrated easily into any PHP-based software. Bad Behavior is the only software known to exist which uses this approach, and in practice eliminates virtually all incoming spam while remaining very fast.
I’m proud to have Bad Behavior running on WordPress.com, and I’m proud to support WordPress.com, and all WordPress bloggers, in the fight against blog spam. Like WordPress, Bad Behavior is released under the GNU General Public License, and development of Bad Behavior is funded through user contributions. If you would like to contribute to further development of Bad Behavior, click here.
Matt Says
I’ve been recommending the plugin to a ton of people, too.
Aug 20th, 2005 at 4:01 pm
Mark J Says
I love how automated it is. That is to say, I love how it is completely automated. No user involvement needed besides checking in for updates (which are becoming more and more trivial). Because of that, I’ve been installing it on the blog of every one of my WordPress clients. I tell them that they have it, and they it’ll make spam an oddity, rather than a plague. They usually ask “so how do I use it?” Heh.
Aug 20th, 2005 at 4:35 pm
Ajay D'Souza Says
Congratulations !!
Now, if you only they wished to display some stats of Bad Behavior
Aug 27th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
Michael Hampton Says
Ajay, I am given to understand that Bad Behavior on WordPress.com runs without logging, making such stats impossible.
Aug 27th, 2005 at 10:41 pm
12thharmonic Says
Kicks ass! Best spam comment plug in I’ve used yet… chopped the buggers off at the knees….
Most gracious thank you(s)!
Sep 8th, 2005 at 6:55 am
Ajay Says
I guess that would make sense, because a site like WordPress.com will get an amazingly large number of spam.
Logging would just increase the load on the mysql databases.
Hopefully they install Spam Karma 2 as well as it can be very useful in addition to Bad Behavior
Sep 14th, 2005 at 5:39 am
Mandy Says
I have your bad behavior installed on all my blogs and it is active in the plugins section of wordpress. All my blogs are still getting tons of spam from the spam bots. Is there a new update I’m missing? Thanks.
Oct 17th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
Michael Hampton Says
Mandy, there have been lots of updates. You should be able to find the latest version of Bad Behavior quite easily, though. Since you didn’t provide any blog address, I can’t exactly go look to see if you are running a recent version.
Oct 17th, 2005 at 2:16 pm
Vincent Says
Great plugin it really works great, i’ve installed it a few weeks ago together with Spam Karma 2. Nowerdays I do not have any spam. The only disapointing thing is that my site has dropped in the google searchresults list from page 1 to 5 when you search on eg Barnhard.
Do you know if that could be caused by bad behavior or Spam Karma 2 ?
Oct 21st, 2005 at 10:13 am
Michael Hampton Says
Heh, I can’t help you with search engine optimisation, not without being paid for it anyway.
I can tell you that Bad Behaviour and Spam Karma do not affect your rankings in Google, though.
Oct 21st, 2005 at 11:07 am
Vincent Says
Thanks, my site used to be on the no 1 position when you where searching for Barnhard, before installing the plugins that’s why I asked.
I thought that maybe the command: Googlebot follow is in your or Spam Karma script. Google may punish this line with a lower ranking.
Oct 21st, 2005 at 11:28 am
Jenifer Says
Does this make any sense that bad behavior protects wordpress? :S
Dec 17th, 2005 at 3:58 am