Bad Behavior Plugin – what is it and how frustrating it can be

ย  Well, if you could have seen me this morning – this picture sure fit me to a tee.ย  But after hours of researching I found out about Bad Behavior Plugin – what it is and how frustrating it can be and am going to share my story.

This all started with trying to share my post on Digg and getting this We can’t access your link or it doesn’t allow being crawled. If this is a mistake, let us know.ย  Well I started getting this oh about a week ago and ignored it thinking it was just a temporary problem and would work itself out – WRONG.

Then I started to notice that when I tried to Digg others – I would get this same message – so I took that message and Google it to see what I could find out.ย  To my surprise, I found that there were many others having the same issue and on the forums were people asking for help and NO ONE responding ๐Ÿ™

Then today, my friend Jane told me that she tried to Digg my latest blog post (thanks Jane) and she got the same message – well that was enough – so thought I’m going to find just what is going on and get this fixed.ย  I know that it was working before and have Dugg many articles and blog post.

So back to Google I went and still found the same frustrating answers that I got before.ย  At this point, I thought it must have been my info on Digg – so went and check all the info on Digg and seen that it all looked fine – even had my link included there.

Jane recommended that I check my permalinks and we both went over them as I had changed it to include the date for SEO purposes – making it easier for the bots to see it’s fresh content.ย  After comparing what she had and what I had – we came to the conclusion that was not it.

This point I was at a loss on what to check and told her that when all else fails, walk away.ย  I went and got something to eat and cup of coffee and came back, set down and then the light bulb went on.ย  Bad Behavior – I just installed that plugin about a week ago to help with my spam – so just out of curiosity I deactivated the plugin and then tried to Digg my post and yea you guessed it – it worked woooooohooooo.

So I private messaged Jane on Skype and asked her to try it again and she came back with the same response – it worked.ย  What did you do – told her I deactivated a plug in and that is why you have to be remember changes that you make to your blog and retract what you have done to correct problems.

Now you are wondering what is Bad Behavior plugin?

Bad Behavior prevents spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. You can read more about this plugin here Bad Behavior Plugin

Well after reading all the fine print – I found this Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.ย  So since I’m not a techie person – I went and looked at the log that it give you as to the sites it blocked and found that it was blocking Digg and giving this reason Required header ‘Accept’ missing.ย  At this point, I was frustrated so bad that I didn’t feel like researching this further and at this point thankful that Digg was working again.

If there are any techie people out there that would like to explain what happened or even maybe the creator of the Bad Behavior Plugin – I would be happy to hear what all this means.ย  Thanks for listening and letting me blow off some steam.

31 thoughts on “Bad Behavior Plugin – what is it and how frustrating it can be

  1. Nancy, this was an AWESOME post, even if I have never encountered this problem myself. I admit, I’m not tjhat good on using Digg, mostly I use Ping or AddThis, easy piecy stuff. Thank you for sharing this valuable content (and your frustrations!) nevertheless, out of frustrations came something really great; this blog post of yours! Good Work!

    • Thanks Mia and you are right – you have to have a positive out of a negative and this is what this blog post did for me. I also did the easy piecy stuff and then decided that I should see what these other places are about and have met many people on these other sites IE Digg, Stumbleupon, Pinterest – this way it gives me a more personal touch – JMO .

  2. Great post, Nancy. I’ve run into plugins that I tried to use on my blog and it had disastrous affects – even to the point of not being able to access my blog… thank goodness for backups…

    Jane

  3. Nancy,

    It’s your feed possibly that you need to update. Most of these outside sites require that you use your feed account, generally feedburner, to post your links onto outside websites. Digg, Facebook’s Netoworked blogs, friendfeed and others. Go to http://feeds.feedburner.com select your feed and than click on edit feed details. There will be three boxes, the third one down Feed Address is the one you want. That is your feedaddress. Next go to digg and make sure the two match up. Hope that helps ๐Ÿ™‚

    • Thanks Beth – I will try that but I do have a feed with feedburner – but never thought to check that as I haven’t made any changes to it lately – and I know I should test things occasionally and make sure they are still working – thanks for the reminder

  4. What an awesome post Nancy. Even though you were letting of some steam, you were sure saturating others with information to prevent them from having the fire to even get started. Thank you so much for this. I did not know that certain plugins could cause you to have trouble on your sites.

  5. Ooops I clicked on dig and nothing happen only that the number three changed to number 4 – so I guess you did solved the problem. But one question though – is this “bad behavor plugin” something I should download – couse this sounds great to use to get rid of all the bad comments I get and have to delete daily.

    /anette

    • Thanks as it does seem to be fixed and it’s up to you – from what I could tell – it did catch lot of the spam and what I liked about it – you really never seen them unless you went into the log and check them there. Have you tried Akisment? I would download that one as my first choice as it works great

  6. Thanks for sharing your experience Nancy! I’m an active Digg user and was planning to use this plug-in since it really is of great help. Anyway, with your experience, I change my mind on using this plugin. Thanks again Nancy! ๐Ÿ™‚

  7. Nancy, now you know why they call this plugin “bad behavior”… look at the bright side when you get spam: your blog is being found. Yes, it is very annoying but if you do not get any spam at all, better check google to see if your website/blog is indexed at all ๐Ÿ˜‰

    • Yes good point Xarah but there are also programs out there that do nothing but spam blogs with comments – and only looking for ways to get their links out there – I mean when I get people with links to selling watches, low cost drugs, etc – and a generic comment well…… Like great post, good info – that is why it’s important to leave a comment with something constructive in it.

  8. It always happen that some plugins create some kind of problem. And banning plugins and plugins such as bad behaviour help you restrict spam but also stops others from doing social media activity with your site

  9. There’s an easy solution to this! ๐Ÿ™‚

    There’s a file in your bad behaviour plugin directory named “whitelist.sample.ini”. Rename it to “whitelist.ini”. Open it with a text editor, like notepad. You see the two Digg IPs listed? Digg is actually blocked by default because the bad behaviour plugin author told me about an hour ago, “Digg’s robot inappropriately uses a suspicious User-Agent string, rather than identifying itself as Digg, and therefore gets blocked by Bad Behavior. It has done so for some time. In order to use Digg, you will need to whitelist its IP address(es) or ask Digg to correct the problem with their robot.”

    So BB has set-up the whitelist file in advance as a workaround (but sort of made it difficult to find, right?). The only thing you need to change in the whitelist.ini file is to comment-out the last two lines by placing a semicolon in front of them, (the urls for example.php and open). Save the file and ftp it to the bad behaviour plugin folder.

    Refresh your browser page and re-try to share your post to Digg and it should work just fine. ๐Ÿ™‚

    • WOW Doug thanks for the info and knew that had to be a solution out there somewhere and that is what I love about the internet. You put info out there and most of the time you can find someone with the answer or solution because they have been there and did that.

      This is great to know and will see what I can do and hope that others that read your comment will try this also. Thanks again.

  10. Nancy,

    Passing along an update on the latest version of bad behaviour. For WordPress only, the Digg IPs must now be listed in their new admin settings page, not the whitelist file. If you do a WP auto update to the latest version of BB, WordPress wipes out the whitelist file and stops Digg sharing, hence the new settings page.

    Non-Wordpress apps will still use the whitelist.ini file.

    See my post for details: http://allthingsdemocrat.com/2012/03/23/problems-sharing-to-digg/

  11. Nancy,
    You are one of the most helpful people on the internet I know.
    Thanks for sharing this and I will hold off on bad behavior because of it
    bad behavior..
    Thanks,
    Jim

    • Well from the comments that I got there does seem to be a fix – I have not had time to try them yet but while I did have it – the plugin worked great and I really liked it – so will let you know when I have time to look at it again.

  12. Hello Nancy,

    Wow, you say you are not a techie, I’ll tell you, you are more techie than most people on the planet, to have found out about this, and how to solve the problem.

    Also, this:

    “Jane recommended that I check my permalinks and we both went over them as I had changed it to include the date for SEO purposes โ€“ making it easier for the bots to see itโ€™s fresh content”

    makes your blog post an awesome read, I didn’t know about that, even though I do choose the same permalink setting with date. Thanks!

    Philippe
    Philippe Moisan recently posted..Day 3 of Tools To Life Coach Steele program

  13. Hi Nancy!

    Could you please give very simple instructions on how to deactivate the bad behavior plugin? I have spent hours researching this and simply cannot figure out to do so. Thanks so much!

    Michele
    Michele recently posted..Pray The States

    • Ok remember I’m not a techie person but will try – you go to your dashboard – click on plugins and that will give you your list of plugins that you have installed – scroll down till you find the plugin that you want deactivate. Click deactivate and follow the instructions from there. Over time, I have found that it’s better to deactivate vs deleting them as I have had some mess up my blog when deleting. ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR BLOG BEFORE ACTIVATING OR DEACTIVATING ANY PLUGINS.

  14. Hi Nancy,
    I have been taking WP classes for a long while now. Terry Anglin is awesome! He gave us a great plugin last we for the spam and spam bot’s. It’s called si captcha anti spam. Don’t have to change anything with it, just activate. It immediately put a captcha on my blog page. Spammer’s usually won’t bother and the spam bot’s can’t leave comment’s.

    Great info. here as always, keep up the good work.

    Warmest Regard’s,
    Cheryl Ryning
    Cheryl Ryning recently posted..Business Offerings

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