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

  Well, if you could have seen me this morning – this picture sure fit me to a tee.  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.  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.  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 🙁

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.  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.  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.  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.  I went and got something to eat and cup of coffee and came back, set down and then the light bulb went on.  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.  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.  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.  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.  Thanks for listening and letting me blow off some steam.