Bad Behavior on WordPress

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

Installation

Bad Behavior requires WordPress 2.7 or later. Version 3.0 or later is recommended. Bad Behavior is compatible with network (multi-site) installations and can either be network activated or activated on a blog-by-blog basis.

To install Bad Behavior, visit your WordPress administration (or network administration) page, click Plugins, then click Add New, type “Bad Behavior” in the search box, and then click Install Now next to the Bad Behavior search result.

Manual Installation

Bad Behavior installs like any other multi-file WordPress plugin. Unzip the bad-behavior.zip file, and you will have a bad-behavior folder containing all the Bad Behavior files.

Upload both the folder and its contents to your wp-content/plugins directory, taking care to use ASCII mode. You should end up with a bad-behavior folder in your plugins folder which contains the Bad Behavior files. Once on the server, activate the plugin from your admin page.

Upgrading

If you have at least version 2.0.19 of Bad Behavior, and version 2.7 or later of WordPress, you can use WordPress to upgrade Bad Behavior automatically. Simply visit your Plugins page and click the link to update automatically.

Upgrading from pre-2.0 (Historic)

If you are upgrading from any version prior to the 2.0 release of Bad Behavior, you need to perform the following steps before installation:

First, remove all copies of Bad Behavior 1.x and any pre-release copies of Bad Behavior 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.

Usage

After installation you don’t need to do anything! Bad Behavior protects all of your WordPress posts, pages and feeds automatically.

You can configure Bad Behavior from the Settings » Bad Behavior administration screen. In addition to the standard options, you can configure the following additional options with WordPress:

Statistics (default true): You can display Bad Behavior statistics in your blog footer. This supersedes the Bad Behavior Stats plugin which was used with 1.x versions of Bad Behavior. Note that some WordPress themes may display the stats in strange places or with odd styling; if this happens, contact your theme designer for assistance.

To view the Bad Behavior log, visit Tools » Bad Behavior. Log entries shown here have several clickable fields which can be used to filter the log entries by user agent, IP address, block reason and more.

Whitelisting

On rare occasions you may wish to whitelist a specific user agent or IP address range. You can also whitelist specific URLs on your site, so that Bad Behavior will never protect a request to that URL. To do so, edit the bad-behavior/whitelist.inc.php file, and insert the exact user agent or IP address range desired. Bad Behavior accepts single IP addresses or CIDR format address ranges. If you find something is blocked that should not be, however, please contact me so that I can look into it as well.

(Note: Bad Behavior’s whitelist is not yet IPv6 aware, though neither are most spammers. Full IPv6 support is planned.)

Caching Plugins

Bad Behavior works with WP Super Cache. If you’re using a very old caching plugin like WP-Cache, Staticize Reloaded or some other plugin, please upgrade. By simply activating the Bad Behavior plugin, you will receive protection from comments and trackbacks, however spambots will still be able to crawl your site.

To enable Bad Behavior to protect cached pages, enable Bad Behavior Support in WP Super Cache’s settings page. (Due to a serious bug in older releases of WP Super Cache, you should update to the current release of WP Super Cache.) Note that Bad Behavior cannot prevent access to “super cached” pages in WP Super Cache’s mod_rewrite mode; Bad Behavior can only protect “cached” pages in WP Super Cache’s PHP cache or legacy cache modes. Bad Behavior protects submission forms regardless of which WP Super Cache caching mode you select.

Bad Behavior works with W3 Total Cache and no changes are needed. Note that when using W3 Total Cache, Bad Behavior is unable to protect cached pages; however, Bad Behavior still protects uncached pages and all submission forms.