Bad Behavior 2.2 RC4 (2.1.16)
January 25th, 2012 by Michael Hampton
Bad Behavior 2.1.16 has been released. For 2.1 users, this is a maintenance release and upgrading as soon as possible is recommended. Legacy 2.0 users should make migration plans as soon as possible.
This release is the fourth and final release candidate for Bad Behavior 2.2 and should be safe to use on production sites.
Please note: The 2.0 series of Bad Behavior is receiving limited updates, including unblocks, bug fixes and security fixes only.
Who should upgrade?
All users should make plans to upgrade from 2.0 at this time. People who are porting Bad Behavior to other platforms should finalize any necessary changes to their ports.
What’s new?
New in this release (since 2.1.15):
- A bug caused Bad Behavior to interfere with other PHP code which opened PHP sessions. This interfered with a wide variety of code, most notably various CAPTCHA solutions. This issue has been fixed.
- WordPress: A PHP warning would be printed if Bad Behavior was unable to look up the hostname for an IP address in the administrative page. This warning has been suppressed.
- MediaWiki: A spurious PHP warning would be printed when first installing Bad Behavior. This warning has been suppressed.
- The sample whitelist included with Bad Behavior now includes an updated IP address range for digg.
- Bad Behavior is now licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, either version 3, or at your option, any later version.
What’s coming?
At the moment, barring any major bugs, this release will be 2.2. The last thing remaining to be done is documentation; this somehow always turns out to be a larger job than the actual code. I will be updating the online documentation over the next days as my time permits.
Since this branch is finally about as stable as it will get, post-2.2 I will be returning to focus on spammers who have so far evaded Bad Behavior and increasing its capability to block many of the new spambots which have appeared on the network in the last few months.
I will also be focusing on a major rewrite of Bad Behavior which will eventually become 3.0, focusing on lessons learned over the last seven years and bringing in new features which have proved impossible to implement in the current framework. I hope the next seven years will be as exciting as the last, and that together we can kill even more spammers. Dead.
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Support
If you’ve been here more than a few months, you’ve noticed that this release has been very long delayed. The primary reason for this is that, like most of you, I have to spend my days making money, and can only devote spare time to this project. Unfortunately my spare time is quite limited; I only get to spend more time on this when the community of Bad Behavior users want me to do so enough to put actual money behind it. Then it becomes “money making” and I can actually do significant work on it.
What’s more, I have a lengthy to-do list for a major rewrite which, if it ever gets done, will be Bad Behavior 3.0. I’m excited about it but I have no time to devote to it. This is doubly unfortunate because one of my favorite things in the world is beating spammers to within an inch of their…I mean giving them a quick clean…excuse me. Stopping spam. That’s it.
As I put the finishing touches on 2.2, get the documentation written and prepare it for final release, I’m asking you to decide how much time you want me to spend on this. What is it worth to you? Donate now to ensure that I can continue development and find new ways to frustrate spammers.
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