Technology

Tom Raftery is on Bad Behaviour!

I see Michael Hampton has released the latest version of his Bad Behaviour plug-in for WordPress. Bad Behaviour is a plugin for:

blocking malicious activity, including blog/wiki spam, e-mail address harvesting, automated cracking attempts, and more. It does all of this looking only at the HTTP request headers; for POST data, the content of the spam is not analyzed at all

I have been using Referrer Karma for this previously and it has proven quite useful. I’m going to try Bad Behaviour for a time now and see which of the two I prefer. One point in Bad Behaviour’s favour is that it has an admin page accessible from within WordPress. With Referrer Karma you need to do your administration seperately.

Via James.

12 thoughts on “Tom Raftery is on Bad Behaviour!”

  2. Michael,

    thanks for stopping by and commenting.

    Of course you are absolutely right. I think I just may do that (esp since Referrer Karma isn’t straightforward to uninstall!).

  3. Running at least two anti-spam filters is the best way to keep your blog spam-free. Bad Behavior takes care of 95% of MacManX.com’s incoming spam, and Akismet takes care of the other 5%.

  6. What’s your thinking on running three James ‘cos I’m running Akismet as well!?

    When it comes to anti-spam filters, more is always better, unless they interfere with each other, cause any noticeable performance impact, or show absolutely no benefit. In your case, Referrer Karma will be executed first, followed by Bad Behavior, and then Akismet if any “POST” requests pass Bad Behavior, so you shouldn’t have to worry about the three filters interfering with each other.

    I used to run Referrer Karma before I installed Bad Behavior, and I haven’t needed it since, so I’m willing to bet that you won’t either.

    If memory serves me correctly, I think you just have to remove the call to Referrer Karma from whichever template file(s) you added it to and then drop the Referrer Karma MySQL table or database.

  7. I think you just have to remove the call to Referrer Karma from whichever template file(s) you added it to

    Yup, I think that’s all that needs to be done as well but trying to remember which files I added the Referrer Karma call to is another thing!

  8. Pingback: Advanced Technology Products Interactive » Blog Archive » Installed some spam catchers

  9. The captcha gets 99.9% of spam for us (you’ll never get the human manually entered spam). I’m just curious why people don’t go down that route. Is it seen as an intrusion?

  10. Roger,

    no, no, no, no, no.

    CAPTCHA’s are evil. Seriously they are bad.

    The American Foundation for the blind has written many times about how difficult Captchas make browsing for blind or partially sighted people.

    And the W3C (not an organisation given to hyperbole) in a report on Captcha’s said:

    A common method of limiting access to services made available over the Web is visual verification of a bitmapped image. This presents a major problem to users who are blind, have low vision, or have a learning disability such as dyslexia.

  12. I don’t know what other’s views on this are but personally I am against CAPTCHAs because they are the lazy way out.

    They disrespect your readers throwing the burden back on them by adding an extra step to the process rather than putting the burden on the spammer.

    I have written several articles on spam prevention. I find that a combination of a good .htaccess file, a good word list in Options -> Discussion in WordPress and Aksimet keeps almost all spammers at bay.

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