Wednesday Night, Co-Contributor and host of Angry Seafood, ChrisC notified me that he was being blocked by the WordPress Anti-Spam plugin, Bad Behavior. It wasn’t just him. I tried to log in to my own blog and was blocked, here, at my Humor Blogging site, and on my test sites.

The message told me that I might be a spammer, or spreading viruses. It’s my site!

I disabled Bad Behavior, and enabled moderation for first time commentators. This morning, I had two comments from first-timers. I feel bad about that, not just because I know how annoying that is, but also because I was away from the computer the entire evening.

Fortunately, Mark Rayner of the Skwib notes that this was a more universal problem. It seems that anyone using BB needs to install an update.

I apologize for the frustration and inconvenience of moderating first time commentators Sinister Dan and Allen Boss. I will have the Bad Behavior plugin updated at Lunch today.

Thanks to Mark for the tip.

Bad Behavior 2.0.11 now playing nicely

I’ve installed the newest version of BB on all my sites, and things seem to be working smoothly. I have always liked Bad Behavior, because it stops the spam before it posts.

Akismet, Spam Karma, and others flag spam based on certain requirements, after it attempts to post the spam messages. This works as an excellent backup to BB, but can be very time consuming for anyone worried about looking for false positives (Legitimate comments that get flagged), if it’s the sole method of preventing spam.

With BB, very little gets through to Akismet, and the amount that makes it past that stage is easy to manage.

Now that Bad Behavior is working again, I can continue to enthusiastically endorse its use.

Category: I'm No Geek Tags: Bad Behavior, plugins, Wordpress