Bad Behavior 2 On the Loose
The popular anti-spam solution for WordPress and other platforms has just been given a facelift. Bad Behavior 2 is now in the wild and claims to have at most only one database call per transaction, can be measured in single milliseconds and now has the option to turn off blocking of legitimate users behind corporate proxies. Author Michael Hampton has been putting a lot of time and effort into this complete rebuild. I know because I’ve talked to him about it. (Maybe we need an interview with him… Whaddya think?)
Personally, I’ve moved away from Bad Behavior because of the proxy issues that were in version 1. At this point I’m pretty satisfied with my spam solutions so I have not had tried BB2 yet. I’d be interested to hear feedback on it. Feel free to post in the comments.
Wait until you wake up and find a thousand spams came in overnight mixed in with 3 good comments that were marked as spam. That’s the sort of situation Bad Behavior was designed to solve, by preventing (most of) the thousand spams from arriving in the first place.
I’ll check this out – though I’m very very happy with the performance of Akismet (which we now have a commercial license for). Good stuff there.
Matt
I was kinda scared of using bad behavior since I red in several blog posts and comments that visitors could not post at all, and even blog authors were experiencing problems although there were not using any corporate proxy.
Thus I was looking into it and have implemented a three-step spam protection: Firstly I have coded a math comment plugin. But this is no solution for trackback, therefore Trackback Validator plugin is in use as well. In addition, akismet is being used, just in case if something comes thru.
Before I have implemented that, I have used akismet only and was receiving up to 6500 spams per day, most of them were normal comment spams and no trackback spams. Now, the math comment spam plugin does most of the job and also avoids any entries in the mysql database which is an additional positive aspect related to performance.