A couple weeks back I installed Michael Hampton's Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress. Seemed to have a attracted a lot of positive comments while I've been drowning in spam, so I figured, what they heck. Well, it turns out that this is a pretty heavy duty solution that can bring some unintended consequences. For one thing, forget about going directly to your WordPress blog from your Gmail account. Bad Behavior blocks the Google proxy. And, as Tom Raftery and I discovered, forget about showing up on TechMeme. Though you can edit BB's whitelist.inc.php file to ignore TechMeme's IPs (70.86.131.10, 70.86.46.66, and 82.165.180.34), Tom hasn't seen any success yet. With Akismet's recent nap, I'm going to leave BB running for awhile longer with the IPs whitelisted and see what happens. Unlike Tom, I'm not that concerned about getting on TechMeme, but it is kind of a bummer that we haven't found a simple and reliable solution yet.

💬 Comments from the original post

Michael Hampton · 2006-08-28 20:25:48

You know, as a point of etiquette, it's usually a good idea to contact the author of a piece of software when you're having a problem with it, when it's possible to do so. (Obviously this doesn't apply to Microsoft software...but I digress.) As for TechMeme, Gabe's bot is generating bad requests (HTTP 400) and I have no idea why, as the affected user didn't send me any log entries. This is apparently a different coding problem with his bot than the previous coding problem which got it blocked by Bad Behavior (and which I'm led to believe has been fixed).

Michael Hampton · 2006-08-28 20:31:28

By the way, the problem with the Google Wireless Transcoder being blocked took all of two minutes to fix. It would have been fixed much sooner had you actually contacted me to report the problem.

Tom Raftery · 2006-08-28 22:47:29

Chris, Getting on TechMeme wasn't the only reason why I have disabled the plugin. I was also concerned by some of the comments of the comment author tbh.

Chris Messina · 2006-08-29 11:29:17

Hey Michael, sorry about not contact you directly before posting -- I talked to Gabe because I wasn't showing up in TechMeme and didn't know why. I didn't think that Bad Behavior was related until he told me otherwise. And with Tom's post, it seemed useful to post about the issue for the benefit of others -- I'm not faulting your code or Gabe's -- I don't know where the problem truly lies -- my only concern is with the ultimate effect, which, I hope somehow gets fixed (not being much of a developer, I'm not in the position to fix it myself either). As for Tom -- sorry, didn't realize the entirety of your reasoning.

Michael Hampton · 2006-08-29 11:55:28

I have been hoping it gets fixed ever since I found out about the problem, but it's up to Gabe to fix his bot.

Make You Go Hmm: » WP plugin Bad Behavior and Techmeme bot conflict resolution · 2006-10-14 22:56:43

[...] Tom Raftery had the same problem as I and wrote about it in August 2006 prompting a somewhat heated discussion in the comments between the Techmeme and the Bad Behavior plugin developers. I don’t know if this is the exact issue for Thatedeguy but it was for Tom and I. Chris Messina also had the same problem. [...]