Bad Behavior on MediaWiki

This page contains the installation guide and usage notes for Bad Behavior on MediaWiki.

Bad Behavior is a MediaWiki extension. It is fully supported on MediaWiki 1.11 or later versions; while it is believed to work as far back as 1.6 these versions are not supported.

Upgrading from pre-2.2 (Historic)

If you are upgrading from any version prior to the 2.2 release of Bad Behavior, you need to perform the following steps before installation:

First, remove all copies of Bad Behavior 1.x and any copies of Bad Behavior prior to 2.2. Then, use phpMyAdmin, the MySQL command line, or another tool to remove any *bad_behavior or *bad_behavior_log tables in your database.

Now you are ready to install Bad Behavior version 2.2.

Installation

Before uploading, copy the settings-sample.ini file to settings.ini and customize the configuration variables there. In addition to the standard configuration options, which you must set in Bad Behavior’s settings.ini, you can set the following options in LocalSettings.php:

$wgBadBehaviorTimer (default true): Adds an HTML comment to wiki pages showing Bad Behavior’s run time and version. This has only been tested on the default vector skin.

Upload the bad-behavior folder and its contents to your MediaWiki extensions directory, taking care to use ASCII mode if you use FTP. You should end up with a bad-behavior folder in your extensions folder, which contains the Bad Behavior files. Once on the server, edit your LocalSettings.php file, and add these two lines at the end of the file.

require_once( '$IP/extensions/bad-behavior/bad-behavior-mediawiki.php' );

If you are upgrading from a Bad Behavior version prior to 2.2, you may have a line referencing includes/DatabaseFunctions.php in your LocalSettings.php file. You should remove this line from LocalSettings.php.

If you are upgrading from a Bad Behavior version prior to 1.1, you may have this line or a similar line in your index.php file instead. This is because prior versions were not full-fledged MediaWiki extensions. Remove it from index.php and place it in LocalSettings.php.

Usage

After installation you don’t need to do anything! Bad Behavior protects your entire MediaWiki automatically. Note that Bad Behavior is unable to prevent access to cached pages.

To view the Bad Behavior log, you will need a copy of phpMyAdmin installed, or some other way to view the database. Most Web hosts include phpMyAdmin as part of the control panel. Bad Behavior stores its log in the *bad_behavior table in your MediaWiki database. Browse or search through it with phpMyAdmin, the MySQL command line, or another tool. At this time Bad Behavior for MediaWiki does not come with a built-in log viewer, though this feature is planned.

(* represents the table prefix $wgDBprefix, if defined.)