Bad Behavior 2.1.7
August 9th, 2010 by Michael Hampton
Bad Behavior version 2.1.7 has been released. It is a development release intended for testing and verification of new functionality and should not normally be used on production sites.
Please note: The 2.0 series of Bad Behavior is receiving limited updates, including unblocks, bug fixes and security fixes only. Future development is taking place in the 2.1 development tree.
Who should upgrade?
All development users should upgrade to ensure that web pages are indexed properly in the Bing search engine.
What’s new?
New in this release (since 2.1.6):
- Changes in the way Microsoft does round-trip DNS identification for its search engine IP addresses caused msnbot, the search engine crawler for Bing, to be intermittently blocked. This issue has been resolved. (This issue does not affect the 2.0 series, which uses a different method of identification.)
- Minor changes have been made to the way requests are handled when the web site uses the CloudFlare reverse proxy service. More changes may come in the near future; the ultimate intent is to be able to support any server behind any reverse proxy.
What’s coming?
In the next few releases I will be rolling out a significant number of blocks intended to catch a wide variety of malicious robots. These include content scrapers, referrer spammers, automated cracking tools and more. Each of these is going through an extensive review prior to being released, to ensure that legitimate requests are not blocked.
Download
Download the latest development release of Bad Behavior now!
Support
I can only spend time on improving Bad Behavior when incoming donations cover the cost of my time. Otherwise I have to engage in paying work to keep food on my table.
I happen to like giving spammers a hard time, and it’s frustrating that I don’t get to spend enough time on it. You can help me make Bad Behavior even better by setting up a recurring contribution, or making your most generous one-time contribution for any amount.
Thank you again for supporting Bad Behavior development!
Álvaro Degives-Más Says
So far, so good. One thing: I’m noticing Yahoo’s Slurp bot (i.e. coming from Yahoo’s .crawl.yahoo.net domain) is getting smacked on the nose because of a missing Accept header… Do you know if that’s some temporary misbehavior of their bot, or not? Thanks in advance!
Aug 27th, 2010 at 2:53 am
Michael Hampton Says
That’s a new one. Maybe somebody should yell at them for being stupid. I’ll deal with it in the next release.
Aug 27th, 2010 at 2:54 am
Álvaro Degives-Más Says
You’re scary as fast as you are, you know that!
Thanks again. I’ll try and yell into their seemingly /dev/null routed customer support helpdesk once more…
Aug 27th, 2010 at 2:57 am
Tony Vanelli Says
i noticed that the plugin is using the long deprecated get_settings() method on line 108 of bad-behavior-wordpress.php
i recommend/request changing get_settings() to get_option() per http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_settings
help us help wordpress scrub all this old code (and related filesize and security issues!) from future releases!
otherwise, awesome plugin!
Oct 18th, 2010 at 9:02 pm
Ballet news Says
Bad behavior has stopped working for me. I’ve had over 70 spam in a couple of hrs and my dashboard says that it’s not catching any spam. Please can you help? Thanks
Nov 22nd, 2010 at 3:41 am