Word Press Plugin Of The Month: Bad Behavior

Spam is a terror for any blogger and can literally destroy your site if you get hit by the wrong person. In order to combat spam there are a number of plugins for wordpress. Bad Behavior is currently among one of the most popular and is saving bloggers around the world from spam terrorists.

Bad Behavior was designed and built by watching actual spambots which harvested email addresses, posted comment spam, and used fake referrers. By logging their entire HTTP requests and comparing them to HTTP requests of legitimate users, it is possible to detect most spambots. Bad Behavior blocks spambots with a short error message. It also has three configurable User-Agent lists for spambots and other malicious bots which actually identify themselves. Bad Behavior can use string matching or regular expression matching against a User-Agent.

Bad Behavior also will target bots which fail to obey robots.txt. At this time some of these bots are banned by User-Agent, though in the future Bad Behavior will detect them automatically.

Bad Behavior intends to target any malicious software directed at a Web site, whether it be a spambot, ill-designed search engine bot, or system crackers. In that spirit, it is not limited to WordPress users; a generic interface has been provided whereby it can be integrated into virtually any PHP-based software.