Bad Behavior 2.0.7 has been released.
I’ve got a nice roundup of bug fixes this time around. Most people should upgrade right away to take advantage of the fixes and additional spam protections.
New in this release (since 2.0.6):
- A bug (apparently in MediaWiki) which caused blank lines to appear on rendered pages in MediaWiki 1.7 has been worked around.
- In version 2.0.6 four blackhole lists were added and incoming POST requests screened against them. Two of these lists generated significant hits in which primarily non-U.S. users who hadn’t actually sent any spam were being blocked. They have been removed. (Once Bad Behavior Blackhole is up and running, the other two may be removed as well, even though they’re performing fine.)
- Two tests which catch some spambots and content thieves which were present in Bad Behavior 1 were inadvertently dropped from Bad Behavior 2. One of the hazards of rewriting something from the ground up. These tests have been restored.
- A check which blocks users behind a Microsoft ISA Server 2004 proxy server, and one other type of proxy server I forget the name of, has been moved to strict mode only. Please disable strict mode if you are expecting traffic from such a source, and please contact Microsoft for a hotfix, if they’ve bothered to fix the bug in their software.
- An additional IP address range for Google has been whitelisted. If you ever receive spam from an IP address owned by Google, please notify me immediately.
- Several additional spambots have been identified and blocked.
Download Bad Behavior now!
As always, if you find Bad Behavior valuable, please consider making a financial contribution. I develop Bad Behavior in my spare time, and every little bit means I have more spare time to devote to its development.
And don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or the mailing list. (They’re the same content.)
Also please note: Due to excessive levels of spam here on wordpress.com, which doesn’t use Bad Behavior anymore, I’ve had to close comments and pings entirely. You can reach me at badbots@nospam.ioerror.us without the nospam.
Bad Behavior 2 Alpha 2 is now available for wide testing. If you’ve used Bad Behavior in the past, or if you currently use Akismet or Spam Karma 2 and those spam numbers just keep going up, it’s time to learn what Bad Behavior 2 can do for you.
Bad Behavior 2 is a ground-up rewrite of Bad Behavior, the only Web spam killer which stops spammers before they even have a chance to get started. It does this by focusing not on the content of the messages, but on the delivery method. As such, for maximum effect, you should use it in conjunction with another content-based plugin, such as Spam Karma 2 or Akismet. But even on its own, Bad Behavior is once again shockingly effective at stopping spam.
When Bad Behavior was first introduced a year ago, (holy crap it HAS been that long!) it was the first tool of its kind targeting malicious activity on a wide variety of Web sites and platforms. While a few other similar solutions exist, such as mod_security for Apache, they can’t be installed by the user, and they don’t specifically target blog and forum spam, wiki vandalism and the like.
By contrast, Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which pre-screens every request to your PHP-based Web site. The first major version of Bad Behavior was ported to nearly a dozen different blogs, wikis, forums and guestbooks, and many more generic ports were reported that their authors kept privately and never released. Bad Behavior 2 intends to keep the tradition of being portable to any PHP-based platform and expand on it by providing a more comprehensive and structured general API which can be wrapped into virtually anything.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t possible with the previous major version of Bad Behavior, owing to its design, thus the ground-up rewrite. Much to my surprise, Bad Behavior 2 is actually smaller than its predecessor, and catches virtually all spam with virtually no false positives. As of the time of this writing, it allowed only one spam to escape, and on investigation I found that spam had been manually posted by a very bored spammer. (In the final release, he too will be blocked.)
Now, down to business. As I said in the previous post, I haven’t completed the MediaWiki and ExpressionEngine ports yet, primarily due to time constraints, and the constraints of having thousands of people being hit by millions of spams and crying out for a solution now. So for now, this test release only runs on WordPress. It requires WP 1.5 or any later version.
Because this is a test release, there are some special installation instructions. First, if you installed 2.0 Alpha 1, delete it first before uploading this version.
This version can be installed alongside Bad Behavior 1, and in fact I recommend it. Upload the files in the usual way for any plugin. Then go to Manage Plugins. You’ll see both versions listed. Deactivate Bad Behavior 1, then activate Bad Behavior 2. To switch back, deactivate Bad Behavior 2, then activate Bad Behavior 1. Do not allow both version 1 and 2 to be active at the same time.
There are no show-stopping bugs that I’m aware of in this release; it’s stable enough for everyday use. However, it is not feature-complete; several items on the roadmap remain unfinished. For instance, a screener for requests which are suspicious but not certainly spam is only partially implemented. (Which is how that manual spammer got through.) The administrative screen located under Options > Bad Behavior is also not yet implemented.
Even so, I believe that this release will cut your spam flow on your WordPress blog to virtually nothing, without any false positives. However, in the extremely rare event that there is a false positive, the user will receive a technical support key and a brief explanation of what he can do to fix the problem (e.g. scan for spyware). Collect this key from the user and then mail it to me and I’ll get back to you with further information. The error page also provides a link the user can click for extended information; this part is also partially implemented and will be what I work on next.
And as always, if you find Bad Behavior valuable, please consider making a financial contribution. I develop Bad Behavior in my spare time, and every little bit counts.
Download Bad Behavior Now!
And don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or the mailing list. (They’re the same content.)
