badbehaviour/badbehaviour

Bad Behaviour is a spam protection system that detects and blocks unwanted Web accesses.

2.2.26 2025-01-15 13:03 UTC

Requires

• php: 8.0 - 8.4

LGPL-3.0-only

• Michael Hampton

• comment
• spam
• antispam
• robot
• referrer
• trackback

README

Bad Behaviour prevents spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place.

Description

Welcome to a whole new way of keeping your blog, forum, guestbook, wiki or content management system free of link spam. Bad Behaviour is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it.

Thousands of sites large and small, trust Bad Behaviour to help reduce incoming link spam and malicious activity.

Bad Behaviour complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site's load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.

Bad Behaviour also transcends other link spam solutions by working in a completely different, unique way. Instead of merely looking at the content of potential spam, Bad Behaviour analyzes the delivery method as well as the software the spammer is using. In this way, Bad Behaviour can stop spam attacks even when nobody has ever seen the particular spam before.

Bad Behaviour is designed to work alongside existing spam prevention services to increase their effectiveness and efficiency. Whenever possible, you should run it in combination with a more traditional spam prevention service.

Bad Behaviour works on, or can be adapted to, virtually any PHP-based Web software package. Bad Behaviour is available for many packages.

Installing and configuring Bad Behaviour on most platforms is simple and takes only a few minutes. In most cases, no configuration at all is needed. Simply turn it on and stop worrying about spam!

The core of Bad Behaviour is free software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3, or at your option, any later version.

Installation

Bad Behaviour has been designed to install on each host software in the manner most appropriate to each platform. It's usually sufficient to follow the generic instructions for installing any plugin or extension for your host software.

On MediaWiki, it is necessary to add a second line to LocalSettings.php when installing the extension. Your LocalSettings.php should include the following:

` include_once( 'includes/DatabaseFunctions.php' ); include( './extensions/Bad-Behaviour/bad-behaviour-mediawiki.php' );

For complete documentation and installation instructions, please visit User Guide

Screenshots

1. Most of the time, only spammers see this. In the rare event a human winds up here, a way out is provided. This may involve removing malicious software from the user's computer, changing firewall settings or other simple fixes which will immediately grant access again.

2. Bad Behaviour's built in log viewer (WordPress) shows why requests were blocked and allows you to click on any IP address, user-agent string or block reason to filter results.

Release Notes

Bad Behaviour 2.2 Known Issues

• Bad Behaviour 2.2 requires MySQL 5.7 or later and PHP 8.0 or later.

• CloudFlare users must enable the Reverse Proxy option in Bad Behaviour's settings. See the documentation for further details.

• Bad Behaviour is unable to protect internally cached pages on MediaWiki. Only form submissions will be protected.

• On WordPress when using WP-Super Cache, Bad Behaviour must be enabled in WP-Super Cache's configuration in order to protect PHP Cached or Legacy Cached pages. Bad Behaviour cannot protect mod_rewrite cached (Super Cached) pages.