- Kelly's World- A View into the mind of Uber Geek, Kelly Adams - https://www.kgadams.net -

Bad Behavior behaving badly…hopefully fixed

Running a public website of any kind means having to deal with various unwanted guests. This blog, for example, receives around 300 spam comment posts a day, and any number of attempts to break in.

With a little bit of research, a site administrator can reduce the effort of managing all of these intrusive visitors to a minimum. The trick is to choose the right tools to keep the site accessible for legitimate users without making it too easy for bad guys to get in or generating a lot of daily work to keep things going.

For this blog, Kelly’s World, I use two tools that work well with WordPress:

Bad Behavior has been working great for a couple of years. On Thursday I attempted to access my blog from work, and got the “you’ve been blocked” message from Bad Behavior. I didn’t think much of it: although where I work is pretty clean from a security perspective, there are several hundred thousand users sharing a few thousand outbound IP addresses, so I could see a false blacklist entry getting added somewhere. But today my friend Chris emailed me saying he had been blocked as well, so I went into full investigation mode…

I don’t know whether I have the problem fixed. Apparently, however, there was a problem with Bad Behavior’s back end configuration, and a patch had to be released to correct it [3]. I was using Bad Behavior 2.0.9: the patch is 2.0.11.

If you are trying to comment on my site (and aren’t some sort of Russian pornography spam bot), please email me at kadams at kgadams dot net. Replace the at with an “@” and the dot with a … dot. You know the drill. Let me know when you encountered the problem, and I’ll look into it.