Support » Plugins » Thanks for Bad Behavior, but…

  • Resolved windyt

    (@windyt)


    This isn’t a huge issue, but I was curious…

    Bad Behavior plugin: It works as advertised, and when I win the lottery, someone’s getting a box of steaks…

    I had a problem upgrade in someone’s popular WP blog from 1.2 to 1.5, and she had resisted until the referrer spam got the best of her site. We’ll hit over 500 blocks in less than 24 hours now, as the bad behavior plugin was the first to be installed after the upgrade. So you have to forgive my late conversion to this plugin.

    Question: While I initially doubted it was killing any false positives, I did look, and lo, there’s an IP that resolves to a Yahoo looking bot and it’s requesting the rss/rss2/atom feeds. It’s not that I’m feeling sorry for a Yahoo bot, but if there WAS a way to whitelist, I initially didn’t see it on the only file I looked at to edit. (I’m using the badbehavior 1.1.4 version)
    The IP was 68.142.195.80 if that makes a difference. If this was simply a routing IP for some sneaky spammer, that would be something different.

    Again, I’m not against killing ALL bots, so don’t go overboard looking for a solution just yet. I’m just too giddy that this plugin worked so well! But perhaps eventually I would want to make sure that the search engine bots aren’t wrongly lumped in with the spammers. If they are, what does this mean for some blog rating sites like Technorati or do all of those sites use different means of looking at blogs?

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  • Hm, the big problem is that search engine bots don’t always act like search engine bots, which they should. I have no idea what bot you saw, so I can’t do a whole lot about it. Read the Bad Behavior FAQ to find out how to submit this bot, and then I can see what I can do.

    In short, go into phpMyAdmin and search the bad_behavior_log table for that IP address. Then hit Export on the search results, and send me the file, to badbots@ioerror.us .

    Thread Starter windyt

    (@windyt)

    Thanks! Sent all three blocks, one for each type of rss feed.

    And again, thanks!

    I have been wondering about Yahoo. I get lots of legit referrals from Google (“Hobo Bill’s Last Ride”, “Eva Cassidy”, etc.). Yahoo, on the other hand, “sends” people to my site only with “saggy heavy…” Now nowhere on my site are the words “saggy” or “hangers” and “heavy” only once (in a post about a beached whale). So what’s the deal? Maybe Yahoo should be blocked, period. And, yes, it does tick me off. It’s one of the last things I want in my “Recent Searches” sidebar. Yahoo evidently lives up to its name… bunch of yahoos (and that is putting it nicely).

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