Comments on: No More Bad Behavior with Bad Behavior on the Prowl

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:10:59 +0000

Sigh, too good to be true. Black magic under question. Thanks for the tip, D’Arcy-san, code master (bows respectufully in a general northerly direction)

By: DArcy Norman

DArcy Norman — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:28:11 +0000

I’ve had waaaay more bad luck with Bad Behavior than I figure it’s worth. I used it on wiki.ucalgary.ca and weblogs.ucalgary.ca, and had a seemingly endless stream of emails from students who were being banned from editing content. I’d check the logs, and BB didn’t like something in their user-agent, or their router setup, or some magic fu. I’ve disabled it on all of the sites I’d used it on…

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:43:25 +0000

Thanks Andy– it was not clear to me exactly what BB does, and after writing it I realized it does not provide any sort of log for its activities.

And thanks for the tips on the gibberish spam.

Sigh, if I had all the time back I waste on dealing with… oh well, pointless dreaming gets you nowhere.

By: Andy Roberts

Andy Roberts — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:46:14 +0000

I’ve installed Bad behavior on several mediawikis and wordpress blogs now, but I’m not very clear as to whether it helps a gread deal or just a little bit.

It doesn’t stop one particular mediawiki spambot technique which finds a page with an ampersand somewhere, then deletes everything after the ampersand. That’s not bad behavior apparently, it’s just pointless stupidity which goes undetected.

For the blogs I was hoping it would save a little bandwidth by intecepting bots before they even get to SK2. But my bandwidth has gone up anyway, maybe less so than without, but I can’t say for certain.

The gibberish comments I’ve heard are an attempt to confuse your filters so it’s probably better to delete them rather than mark as spam.