Now the design needs a few tweaks. This work will eventually become Bad Behavior 2.2. Today I want to update you on some of the changes Bad Behavior needs and what I’m planning for the 2.2 version.

As I noted with today’s 2.0.32 release, development of the 2.0 branch has been limited to bug fixes and security issues so that I can concentrate development on this new version. The development will take place in versions numbered from 2.1. As a development branch, it won’t be appropriate for everyone, but many of you will be interested in following its progress.

Before I get into the details of the roadmap, there’s something I haven’t talked about in a while and should probably do again. Bad Behavior has been a personal project of mine for almost five years now. It was born out of an incident, a couple of months after I started blogging, where I got my first comment spam. Unfortunately, my first comment spam was followed by 700 more over the space of a few hours. As you can imagine, I was thoroughly pissed. I spent some time looking at anti-spam solutions, but at the time there wasn’t much, and what there was didn’t work all that well. I felt I had to roll my own. A couple of months later, Bad Behavior was born.

I still clearly remember cleaning up after that first incident, and killing link spam has become something of a personal crusade for me. But I’ve learned that I can’t possibly do it all alone. Fortunately this field has grown significantly and there are now a whole lot of smart people working on various aspects of the link spam problem. What Bad Behavior brings to the table is to take that 700 spam attack and allow fewer than one percent to reach your blog. Having to clean out 7 spam from the moderation queue is much easier than cleaning out 700. (This is one reason why I advise using more than one anti-spam solution.)

The main technique Bad Behavior uses to accomplish this is to block bots which scrape your site to get access to your comment forms, login forms and other such forms on your site. Once a bot has the form, it can pass it around a botnet and send dozens of spams to that page from all over the world. Preventing malicious bots from accessing the forms in the first place stops the majority of spam. The remainder is a variety of techniques used to identify poorly coded bots which imperfectly masquerade as legitimate web traffic.

As new spammers start up and new botnets come online, some find themselves already blocked, while others need to be analyzed and updates made to block them, so Bad Behavior will always require continuous development. Often this development is delayed because I have to pay bills. As you may be aware if you’ve been a very long time user, I lost my job in 2005 and since then I have lived on revenue from blogging and paid web consulting work. Therefore I can only work on Bad Behavior when my finances permit.

Today my finances do not permit me to do any further work on Bad Behavior, mainly due to the economic recession. If you want this work to continue, as I’ll outline in the roadmap below, skip your morning latte tomorrow and send me a financial contribution. The amount is blank, so fill in whatever you feel is appropriate.

And if you see any problems with the roadmap, or feel it could be improved, feel free to comment below.

Core Changes

The most important change won’t be visible right away. A design change to the core is needed to enable Bad Behavior to be tested using more rigorous test methods. The earliest 2.1 releases will contain this change and I will write tests for each of Bad Behavior’s existing checks. Before the 2.2 stable release, and going forward, a test will be written for each feature introduced into Bad Behavior, to help prevent obvious and silly bugs which require almost immediate updates to fix, as happened with 2.0.30 through 2.0.32. The test suite which emerges from this work will ship as a downloadable package, so that you can test Bad Behavior yourself. (Thanks to Tony Bibbs for suggesting this change.)

Bad Behavior’s various whitelists will be moved out of the core and into a separate file template, downloaded separately from Bad Behavior. This will allow you to update Bad Behavior without disturbing your personal whitelists. This is currently an issue for all platforms. On platforms which support an integrated administrative page for changing Bad Behavior’s settings, and can store settings in the host platform’s database, the whitelists will be manageable from within the administrative page.

Platform Connector Changes

On platforms which do not support an integrated administrative page for changing Bad Behavior’s settings, and require settings to be placed in the platform connector’s file, these settings will be placed in a separate file, downloadable separately from the platform connector. This will allow for the incorporation of settings for new features without updating the platform connector, or conversely, updating the platform connector without disturbing your settings. This is currently an issue for the Drupal module, MediaWiki extension, and possibly other platforms.

The integrated administrative page will be introduced for more platforms. I had originally intended to write this myself for MediaWiki, whose platform connector I maintain, but the lack of adequate developer documentation had made it virtually impossible. (The documentation seems to have improved greatly since then, so I’m going to make another attempt at it.) I expect that these are going to be highly specific to the platform and that little code can be shared between them. If you maintain a platform connector and need assistance with implementing this, please contact me.

The integrated administrative page will be enhanced to allow more complex searching through the database records. Currently it is not possible to search the records except by manually crafting a URL. In the future the entire database will be searchable and you will be able to mark records and forward them to me for analysis. Due to privacy concerns, records sent to me are kept on encrypted media at all times, used solely for analysis of how to permit or block similar traffic (as appropriate) and destroyed within 90 days. Personally identifying information, if present, is not used. I have done this since the beginning.

The current list of platform connectors needs to be updated; it’s come to my attention that some are out of date or their maintainers have stopped maintaining them. If you are, or want to be, a maintainer for a platform connector, please contact me.

The code which creates the database in a new Bad Behavior installation is currently in the core; however, it properly belongs in the platform connector, since it can vary by platform. For instance, the Drupal module already uses its own code for this, but the WordPress and MediaWiki connectors share the same code. This code will be moved out of the core and split into separate files to facilitate reuse where possible, give a slight performance gain, and enable other platforms to do their own initialization where needed.

I’ve identified several new situations in which it would be useful for Bad Behavior to call back to the platform connector to have the host platform perform some action or another. As a result, the platform connector API, such as it is, will expand. It will remain backward compatible, however, in case some platform does not or cannot implement the complete API.

The porting documentation needs to be greatly reworked and expanded. It doesn’t say much except to look at the existing code and base your work off of it, which is perhaps fine for some experienced programmers, but not for everyone.

Bad Behavior needs to be localized, that is, translated into languages other than English. This is still an open design issue, since each platform handles localization in a completely different manner and requires files containing localized translations to be installed in different places. The most likely solution at this point will involve “language packs” which you will be able to download separately from the core. In addition, people will be needed to help translate Bad Behavior. I will make a separate post when I’m ready to accept translations.

Spam Prevention

The core design change mentioned above, which will allow for improved testing, will also enable some new features which haven’t been implementable before, such as improved whitelisting of search engines. As you may know, Bad Behavior has been using the http:BL service from Project Honey Pot to detect spammers for some time now (if you enabled the feature). The http:BL service also identifies many different search engines and can be used to whitelist them, preventing such issues as the recent blocking of msnbot when it began using a suspicious user-agent string. This feature will be available for testing early in the 2.1 release cycle. The original methods of identifying major search engines will remain in place and be maintained for those who cannot use http:BL.

Speaking of Project Honey Pot, Bad Behavior will allow you to serve spammers honey pots or QuickLinks provided by the service, so that it can catch even more spammers.

A screener which uses JavaScript and cookies to identify legitimate users has been in Bad Behavior since the initial 2.0 release, but proved difficult to implement, as it required calls into the host platform which weren’t always available or didn’t work as expected. This feature has been disabled for years. I will finally revisit this technique, as I think there’s still some value in this approach.

And of course I will continue to kill spammers as they come across my radar screen.

Other

Bad Behavior’s documentation has always been less thorough than I would like. It will have to be revamped. In addition I will have to keep on top of it by writing documentation for new features as the new features are written, rather than afterward. Documentation will also need to be translated, and I will need your help for that. I will make a separate posting when I am ready to accept translations.

On many platforms, users currently have to download the Bad Behavior core, then the platform connector, and then upload them together on their web site. If not done perfectly, this can result in errors, or a completely broken site. Where possible, I plan to have a build system which, upon each release of the core, combines it with the platform connector for each platform, an optional language pack, as well as files such as the whitelist and settings templates mentioned above, creating a single download. This should make installing and updating the software more convenient and less error-prone for users of affected platforms.

Finally, I made a proposal long ago for Bad Behavior to automatically update itself. This is not appropriate for everyone, of course, but it may be useful for people on platforms which don’t provide update facilities for their plugins/extensions. This is still a post-2.2 change, though I want to do some preliminary work to see if it can be done reliably and what might be necessary to accomplish it.

I’ve also probably forgotten a few things. They’ll be announced when I remember them.

Status

Bad Behavior must continue to keep up with spammers as they attempt to adapt and find new ways to post their automated garbage. Historically, keeping up with the spammers has not been that difficult, as there is only so much the spammers can do while maintaining their high rates of spamming. Today, 100,000 or more spams in a single run is not unusual, and one spammer I’ve blocked can send 1,000,000 in a day. Bad Behavior attempts to drive up the cost of link spamming by blocking as many automated spammy requests as possible, forcing the spammers to resort to MUCH slower manual methods, or ideally, give up and find more honest work.

I believe the proposed changes outlined above will make Bad Behavior a much stronger tool for preventing link spam while at the same time making it more accessible to a wider variety of users and web site platforms.

Only one thing remains, and that is to do the work. As I noted before, Bad Behavior is a user-supported project. If you think this roadmap looks good, and want to accelerate Bad Behavior development, your financial contribution will help ensure that I can devote more time to its development and bring it to fruition much faster. Otherwise, I have to spend my time first on consulting and other work which brings in revenue, and that means it will be much longer before you see these features.

I would estimate that all of the above would take me about six months to complete if it isn’t funded. At the same time I think contributions totaling $500 or more would allow me time to complete the majority of the above within a month. I know that a lot of you are having financial trouble due to the economy; so am I. Even if you are unable to send a contribution, please leave your comments so that I know you support Bad Behavior and wish it to continue.

This is also the time to send in feature requests. If Bad Behavior doesn’t do something you would like it to do, please leave a comment. (And remember that feature requests accompanied by a contribution are more likely to be implemented sooner.) Due to a hard drive crash I’ve lost all email that was sent to me before August of this year, and possibly some more recent email as well. If you have emailed me with a feature request recently, and don’t see it included above, please also leave a comment.

Thank you again for your support, and here’s to a future without spam.

P.S. If anyone knows how to deliver electric shocks over the Internet, please contact me. This could be the ultimate spam-prevention feature.

One of the two topics I get most frequently is the assertion that Bad Behavior has blocked a legitimate request from an actual user, sometimes even the owner of the blog! Since this seems to come up every so often, I’m going to see if I can help out, and maybe eliminate the need for some of these folks to contact me.

(But before we get started, if you are an AOL user, do not use the built-in AOL browser. Use
Firefox or something else. And get a real ISP as soon as possible.)

Before doing anything else, ensure that you have the latest version of Bad Behavior. Do not leave a comment or contact me if you have failed to update to the latest version. Too many people have done exactly that. It is your responsibility to know how to install and update software on your own Web site.

The next thing to do is to determine why Bad Behavior blocked you. Bad Behavior will display a short message along with a technical support key and a link to “fix the problem yourself.” Make a note of the technical support key, and then click the link. You’ll be presented with more information on why the request was blocked and several suggestions on how to fix the problem.

If you’ve been blocked from a site, and you aren’t the site administrator, please contact that person first, as they will be able to access records on their web server which will be helpful in solving the problem. Be sure to provide them with the technical support key you received. (If you are trying to access a site from a corporate or government network, you may need to contact the network administrator for your company or government agency to resolve the problem.)

If you are the site administrator, and one of your users was blocked and has contacted you for help, you can go directly to the support page and look up their technical support key yourself. You can use either the 8-character key from your database entries, or the 16-character key shown to users, with or without hyphens. You’ll then see the page that would have been shown to that user.

But you should ensure that your user has already followed the suggestions given on the page. The support page is written with non-technical users in mind, and so those of you who really know what you’re doing probably won’t like it, but it’s been my experience that, excepting the occasional bug in Bad Behavior, almost every actual human being who sees the page is able to fix the problem themselves.

If you’re unable to fix the problem yourself, and you’re the site owner/administrator, get your IP address, or the user’s IP address, log in to your phpMyAdmin, and Search the wp_bad_behavior table for the IP address and the last half of the technical support key (without the hyphen). Export the records from phpMyAdmin in SQL format and send them to me. You do not need to zip them, but it’s OK if you do. Please do not export in any other format but SQL. If you send me a screenshot, a PDF, or even worse, an Excel file, I will curse your name until the end of days, and probably not respond.

Finally, if Bad Behavior has been valuable to you, please consider making a contribution to further Bad Behavior development.

Bad Behavior 2.0.8 has been released.

This version contains updates for various “false positive” reports and is recommended for all users.

Updated in this release (since 2.0.7):

• Verizon Wireless EV-DO users are no longer blocked.
• Blocked requests will be subject to a two-second delay before a response is sent. (See below.)
• Some blackhole lists previously used in Bad Behavior have been scaled back or removed.
• The address for the Bad Behavior Blackhole has been added. (See below.)
• Some new spambots have been identified and blocked.

In recent days spam attacks have been on the rise, with one especially obnoxious bot delivering requests so fast that some sites have been taken offline by them. While the requests aren’t especially numerous or resource-intensive, the most common software used by Web hosting providers is very inefficient at serving dynamic pages such as PHP-based Web sites. So even a moderate number of requests can take a whole server down, or lead the hosting provider to take the site down before the whole server goes down.

Bad Behavior now counters this by introducing a short two second delay to blocked requests, before the HTTP response is sent. Since most spambots wait for the response before going on to the next request, this should sufficiently slow down most of the overly aggressive spambots and give Web site operators some breathing room. While I would have liked to put in a delay of a minute or more, there remains the slight chance that an actual human being would be blocked, and they should be able to get a response back in a reasonable time.

With respect to realtime blackhole lists, all of the existing lists target e-mail spam, and since spambots who send link spam are almost always also sending e-mail spam through the same servers, these are a fairly effective means of blocking link spam. However, since they target e-mail spam, they also block legitimate users. The primary issue here is that while an IP address may be added to a blackhole list quickly, it is not removed quickly — or at all — once the spam stops. Thus, people with dynamic IP addresses are unfairly blocked because some other customer was sending spam.

Bad Behavior Blackhole, which should go online within the next few weeks, is designed specifically for link spam. It adds IP addresses to its database quickly when actual spam is received, and in addition, drops the IP addresses once the spam stops. This helps prevent dynamic IP customers from being blocked because another user’s computer was sending spam. Once Bad Behavior Blackhole is online, all other realtime blackhole lists will be dropped from Bad Behavior.

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.)

Now that Bad Behavior 2.0 has stabilized, it’s time to update the roadmap in preparation for the next minor (2.1) and major (3.0) releases.

Before I go into the roadmap, I need to diverge a bit and explain something a lot of people may not be aware of (again).

Bad Behavior is open source software, released under the GNU General Public License, which you can find copies of all over the Internet, or included with the program. (And I make exceptions for linking it to non-open-source software such as ExpressionEngine; contact me if you are in this situation.) You don’t have to pay a cent to download or use it. However, developing it still costs me time and money. Killing blog spam has been mostly a labor of love, however, rather than cash, and as such, has to take a back seat to other more pressing concerns, like anything that generates revenue.

I’ve been pretty successful at maintaining a roughly weekly rate for incremental updates (new spambots, bug fixes, etc.) since the 2.0 release, and with your support, financial and otherwise, I’ll be able to continue that. I think most of the bugs have been worked out at this point, though, so it’s time to look forward.

If you see any problems with the roadmap, or think it could be improved, feel free to comment on it.

Bad Behavior 2.1

Bad Behavior 2 was a ground-up refactoring of the core of the system. Much to my surprise, it wound up being both smaller and faster than the 1.x version. Though people more experienced than I am could have told me that (and one did). For many people it’s orders of magnitude faster. But the early release meant that several things were left unfinished, and those I want to address in 2.1.

First off is the modular architecture. While I made much progress on this, and it’s now near its final form, one more thing will need to change: The parts of the system which are specific to a particular software package (ExpressionEngine, MediaWiki, WordPress, etc.) and those which are user-customizable need to be further separated, so that the core can be updated independently of the wrapper which connects it to your software.

While this isn’t a major issue for WordPress, the architecture of MediaWiki, which has no good way for an extension to save settings, and that of ExpressionEngine, which virtually requires such an approach, are forcing the issue.

By Bad Behavior 2.1, you will have in essence two packages: A core download and a platform-specific download, each of which can be updated separately. While this introduces a bit of complexity, at least for initial installations, it will make updates much easier for most people, as well as allow for several more interesting things down the road. The ExpressionEngine port already uses this approach; to install it, you have to download the Bad Behavior 2 core as well as the EE extension and then integrate them. Ultimately I’ll have a packaging system in place which will make the initial download easier by combining the two into a single download for those who want it, and a core-only download for those who are updating.

For 2.0, I had proposed an administrative screen which would appear inside the host platform and provide various services such as being able to search Bad Behavior’s logs for specific spammers or for potential false positives. This will be complete for WordPress by 2.1. I had planned a MediaWiki special page, but discovered to my dismay that no accurate developer documentation exists for this, so it is on hold indefinitely, until someone updates and/or corrects the documentation on meta (which Brion tells me is wrong and should not be relied on) or provides new documentation. I also plan to provide this for ExpressionEngine, assuming my developer license is still any good.

I also noted that I planned a type of screener which would help sort legitimate browsers from those which were sending spam. This screener, which uses a combination of JavaScript and cookies, was partially implemented in 2.0, but the checks which actually make it work aren’t enabled, as I had not fully debugged them by release. It also turned out to be difficult (maybe impossible) to implement part of it for MediaWiki. I hope to have the screener working for WordPress and MediaWiki by 2.1 and for other platforms at a later date.

Bad Behavior 3.0

It’s a bit early to say exactly what the next major version of Bad Behavior will look like. But one thing is likely to come down the pipeline.

Many people have asked for Bad Behavior to automatically update itself whenever a new version comes along. After the necessary architectural reworking is done for 2.1, it will be possible to provide a framework for Bad Behavior to update itself. I’d like some comments on this, as I can foresee that some people might not like the software updating itself. Should the feature be off by default, or on by default?

Other things on the to-do list

Various bits of documentation need to be updated. I need to host installation instructions, or links thereto, for any platform to which Bad Behavior has been ported, and several of those (such as phpBB and Movable Type) are missing right now.

I need to follow up with some people who have ported Bad Behavior 1 to other platforms in the past and either get them to update their work or let me know that they can’t (e.g. Drupal and DotClear).

Some people have complained that the error messages displayed to people who are blocked aren’t thorough enough or don’t explain well enough how to resolve the problem. I edit these on an ongoing basis whenever I become aware of a particular issue, but with the wide variety of proxy servers out there (and it virtually always is a proxy of some type) it’s difficult to just sit down and provide specific directions for every one of them. I may need some of you to contribute directions on reconfiguring specific proxy servers, and requests for these will likely be posted here in the near future.

End notes

Bad Behavior must continue to keep up with spammers as they attempt to adapt and find new ways to post their automated garbage. As I noted last year, this has been at most a minor issue, as there is only so much the spammers can do while maintaining their high rates of spamming (now 100,000 or more spams in a single run is not unusual, and one spammer I’ve blocked can send 1,000,000 in a day). Bad Behavior attempts to drive up the cost of link spamming by blocking as many automated spammy requests as possible, forcing the spammers to resort to MUCH slower manual methods, or ideally, give up and find more honest work.

While this has actually worked, the spammers have begun to adapt. I am seeing a rise in spam being delivered through botnets of compromised Windows computers running various bits of malware which take over Internet Explorer, and occasionally even Firefox, to do their dirty work. The screener, which I expect to complete by 2.1, should take care of the vast majority of these.

But it remains an ongoing problem, and I’ve set up a separate project whose purpose is to locate and disable these botnets and ultimately cut the flow of spam right from its source. I can’t say much more about this project right now, but a few of you will hear from me about it in the next week or so, and hopefully in a few months I can release more information generally.

If you think this roadmap looks good, and want to accelerate the development of Bad Behavior, or the botnet project, contribute financially and I’ll be able to devote more time to it. And by all means, if you think I left something out that should be in the roadmap, please let me know. And yes, I know a lot of you are flat broke, so even if you are unable to contribute financially, please leave your comments.

Thanks again for your support, and here’s to a future without spam.

Bad Behavior 2.0.5 has been released to provide small bug fixes.

New in this release (since 2.0.4):

• A bug affecting MediaWiki and ExpressionEngine users, and possibly others, caused database errors to be thrown when a POST request was received. This has been fixed. (I thought I’d fixed this previously, but apparently not. This one should fix it for real.)
• A couple of 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.)

Bad Behavior 2.0.4 has been released to provide small bug fixes.

New in this release (since 2.0.3):

• A bug affecting MediaWiki and ExpressionEngine users, and possibly others, caused database errors to be thrown when a POST request was received. This has been fixed.
• A confusing entry in the generic code, which was causing PHP warnings for people who mistakenly used it without changing it, has been altered. The section of code, which users of the generic code are expected to change, referred to a variable which did not exist, and users who failed to change the code for their particular installation received warnings.
• A part of the housekeeping code which optimizes Bad Behavior’s log table has been rescheduled to run in only one of 1000 blocked requests. Under a heavy spam attack this was running much too frequently at its old schedule of one in 25 blocked requests, causing at least one shared hosting provider to complain.

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.)

Update: Due to some errors which creeped in, I’ve repacked the 2.0.4 release. If you already downloaded it and are having strange problems, please re-download it.

Before I get into the release announcement, I just want to ask all of you to send me money so I can buy a T-shirt here at the HOPE conference. Oh, and eat too. NYC has drained my wallet to just about empty. Thanks!

Bad Behavior 2.0.3 has been released to provide additional protection from certain Ukrainian spammers and to prevent certain users from being blocked inappropriately.

New in this release (since 2.0.2):

• A check has been added for a high-volume Ukrainian spammer who can generate 500,000 spams per day (and quite possibly much more).
• A blacklist entry has been relaxed in order to prevent inappropriate blocking of a few rare legitimate users and bots.

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.)

Bad Behavior 2.0.2 has been released to provide additional protection from certain blog and wiki spammers and email address harvesters.

New in this release (since 2.0.1):

• A check has been added for certain types of blog comment and wiki spam.
• Several email address harvesters have been added to the blacklists.

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.)

I took a quick look through the extension and to my eye it looks good. I haven’t tested it myself, but the early results on the forum suggest that it works OK.

Check out the EE forum thread for more info and to download the extension.

Please note these special installation instructions:

You need BOTH the bad_behavior extension from EE AND the standard Bad Behavior download.

To install it: Unpack the stock Bad Behavior download, and you’ll find a Bad-Behavior folder. Inside THAT folder is a bad-behavior folder. Upload ONLY the bad-behavior folder from the stock download, along with the ext.bad_behavior.php from the EE download, to your EE ./system/extensions folder. Then upload the lang.bad_behavior.php file to your EE ./system/language/english folder.

You can then activate and configure Bad Behavior from the Extensions Manager. The ‘strict’ and ‘verbose’ settings should work as for the other ports. I don’t know if the ‘display_stats’ setting has been implemented; I think on EE it probably requires a template change at least…

Thanks, Paul!