Bye Bye Spam Bots

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
by George Appiah

This morning I got up to find a whole bunch of spam in my mailbox. Some idiots are using my box (web server) to spam innocent people (including myself)! So I took a quick trip to the WordPress plugins page to find out what solution could be had. And I found Bad Behavior.

Bad Behavior is designed to integrate into your PHP-based Web site, running as early as possible to throw out spam bots before they have the opportunity to vandalize your site with their junk, or even to scrape your pages for e-mail addresses and forms to fill out.

Not only does Bad Behavior block actual vandalism to your site, it also blocks many e-mail address harvesters, resulting in less e-mail spam, and many automated Web site cracking tools, helping to improve your Web site’s security.

I’ve just installed this, and I’m waiting to see how well Bad Behavior crashes the bad guys.

Update: Looks like Bad Behavior is really aggressive — it’s kicking me out — even with the “strict mode” turned off. Sure, that means it really works … but that also means innocent people might find themselves kicked out as well. I’ve temporarily disabled it, while I dig for a fix.