Comments on: Bad Behaviour blocks TechMeme

By: 412 Precondition Failed, Technorati, Twitter, and Bad Behavior » Webomatica - tech, movies, music blog

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 06:05:29 +0000

[...] of cases where Bad Behavior blocks legitimate access requests, and even certain aggregators like Techmeme (and maybe [...]

By: Make You Go Hmm: » WP plugin Bad Behavior and Techmeme bot conflict resolution

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 06:56:37 +0000

[...] Tom Raftery had the same problem as I and wrote about it in August 2006 prompting a somewhat heated discussion in the comments between the Techmeme and the Bad Behavior plugin developers. I don’t know if this is the exact issue for Thatedeguy but it was for Tom and I. Chris Messina also had the same problem. [...]

By: Bad Behavior Misbehavin’? at FactoryCity

Bad Behavior Misbehavin’? at FactoryCity — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 19:22:52 +0000

[...] And, as Tom Raftery and I discovered, forget about showing up on TechMeme. [...]

By: Michael Hampton

Michael Hampton — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 04:17:26 +0000

All of the requests I have in my server log indicate that Gabe’s bot was served a 400 Bad Request HTTP response, but I can’t find anything in Bad Behavior’s logs here to correlate and discover exactly why it’s still being blocked.

Gabe, if you don’t accept */*, then why would there not be an Accept: line in your headers? The HTTP specification is clear on this: If an Accept: header is not present, the server assumes that anything (i.e. */*) is acceptable.

Assuming you are sending this header, then you are being blocked for some other reason. When someone (Tom?) sends me bad_behavior logs to look at, perhaps I can figure it out.

By: Tom Raftery

Tom Raftery — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:32:43 +0000

Michael and Gabe - thanks for your responses.

I tried adding the ip address to the whitelist but that didn’t appear to solve the problem so for now I have disabled Bad Behavior.

I have plenty of other spam defences in place and TechMeme is more important to me than the spam stopped by Bad Behavior.

By: Gabe

Gabe — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:41:23 +0000

The IP whitelist fix isn’t a great one because I can’t guarantee that I’ll always use the same IPs. But the ones I’m using now are 70.86.131.10, 70.86.46.66, and 82.165.180.34.

Michael, your comment about “repeated informing” me seems deliberately misleading. I was the one who contacted you, and we disagreed about whether asserting Mozilla compatible was legit or not. The fact that all major search engines use that (even Google in some cases) shows you’re holding me to a higher standard than the big guys. (I also tried your tip about sending “Accept: */*”, even though I don’t accept “*/*”. Thanks, but it didn’t help.)

All things considered, yes, I recommend people avoid the BB plugin. Sorry!

By: Michael Hampton

Michael Hampton — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:41:03 +0000

What do you mean, no way to whitelist? That’s what the whitelist file is for.

As for Gabe, I’m deeply disturbed that he would actually tell you to “just uninstall” Bad Behavior — or that you would take such a bizarre suggestion seriously.

And as for his bot, it’s blocked for its shoddy internal coding, which is the same shoddy internal coding I see from just about everybody’s spambots. I’ve repeatedly informed Gabe of the one-line change necessary to allow the bot to pass, but apparently, he’s not made any such change.

When it comes down to a choice between Memeorandum and killing spammers, Gabe loses. Sorry.