Bad Behavior / Bad Behaviour

Bad Behavior 2.0.9

January 8th, 2007 by Michael Hampton

Bad Behavior 2.0.9 has been released. It is a strongly recommended upgrade for all users.

This release is likely the final release in the 2.0 series as I make a major change in the development process; see below for details on this change.

This release addresses a further set of “false positive” reports received from various users which affect some uncommon circumstances.

New in this release (since 2.0.8):

• A workaround has been placed for a problem with the Clearswift Web Policy Engine. Users behind this proxy server are no longer blocked.
• A workaround has been placed for a bug in the LiveJournal OpenID process which Six Apart refuses to fix. Logins using OpenID will no longer fail.
• A workaround has been placed for bugs in some versions of Internet Explorer and Safari web browsers which caused them to be blocked after leaving a comment on WordPress. These requests are no longer blocked.
• A spam prevention feature was causing users to be blocked from their own blogs when they also subscribed to their own feed, or when they accessed the site with multiple web browsers at the same time; it has been disabled for rework.

Download Bad Behavior now!

The 2.0 series of Bad Behavior will be maintained as a legacy branch, with only bug fixes, false positive fixes and security fixes applied to this branch, if any such fixes are needed. No new checks for spammers will be added.

Shortly I will introduce a “development” 2.1 series on a much shorter development cycle, with days or perhaps even hours between releases. In this branch I’ll be experimenting with new spam prevention features, rolling them out quickly and rolling back quickly in case of actual trouble. I’ll also be rolling out a new packaging method which I’ve discussed previously, that will make Bad Behavior even more platform-independent than it currently is, and allow for the “core” to be updated separately from the “glue” which connects it to your host platform.

Once features prove themselves through development and testing to be stable, they’ll be rolled forward into a “stable” 2.2 series, intended for those users who are averse to the risks of blocking legitimate users or having the occasional crash. While I work very hard to ensure that every release, however labeled, does not crash, and does not generate false positives, things occasionally happen which are outside my control.

This parallel development scheme will help balance the needs of the two primary groups of Bad Behavior users.

The first group needs enterprise-grade code which ideally never blocks a single legitimate request and can quickly be rolled into production environments with a high degree of confidence. The tradeoff is the same as it has always been: to prevent any chance of false positives, Bad Behavior’s stable branch will permit some spam, anywhere from 0.1% to 10%, to pass through, and will require a backup solution such as Akismet. Even so, it will drastically reduce the amount of time and money spent managing spam, especially for deployments of dozens or hundreds or thousands of sites.

To serve this class of users more effectively, I’m also studying the feasibility of offering support contracts for enterprise users of Bad Behavior. Services offered under such contracts might include installation assistance, on-call support, hotfix development and deployment, and per-incident support. If your organization may need such a service, stay tuned for more details in the near future.

The second group, I believe, is the majority of Web sites: those for whom a rare blocked user is merely an annoyance rather than a critical problem, and who have much lower tolerance for spam because they aren’t being paid to manage their own blogs, wikis and forums. As much as possible, Bad Behavior’s development branch will limit spam for this class of users to 0.5% missed. The tradeoff is that you will be asked to do what you already do: to report any problems you encounter, whether they be missed spam or blocked users or plain old crashes.

And for users who would like to have their cake and eat it too, the development and stable versions will be installable side-by-side on the same site, and you will be able to switch back and forth between them at the click of a button.

Finally, prior to the first stable 2.2 release, I will be reworking all of Bad Behavior’s documentation and moving Bad Behavior from its current home to a new site dedicated solely to Bad Behavior. So you all will have to update your feed URLs to the new location soon. (Mailing list readers won’t have to do anything.)

In the meantime, Bad Behavior remains a user-supported project, with all code released under the GNU General Public License. If you find Bad Behavior valuable, please consider making a financial contribution. I develop Bad Behavior in my limited spare time, and every contribution means I can devote more time to its development.