Geeklog Forums

I haven't installed the bad behavior plugin mainly because I was worried about it banning legit users. Does this happen often or at all with this plugin? I ran a test for a few days on one of my sites and it had banned almost 200 ips.

Also should this plugin take care of people scraping your site? I had someone attempt to download my site which generated over 6000 hits in a couple miniutes. This basically shut down my site unitll I realized what was happening and banned the ip.

Thanks for any input

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Bad Behavior checks for two things: Non-standard HTTP requests and those coming from known spam bots. It will not help against people trying to download your entire site (I just noticed one such case here on geeklog.net yesterday - over 22000 requests from one IP address ...).

On (very) rare occasions, it may block legit requests. Usually when people are using outdated or broken software, e.g. some old proxy. We've also had a case where some ISP required all users to use the same proxy and Bad Behavior blocked some spambot coming from that address - and also the next legit user using that same proxy.

Cases like the latter usually clear themselves up automatically, as Bad Behavior unblocks IP addresses automatically after a while. Non-standard HTTP requests are always blocked, though.

From my experience here and on several other sites, I have to say that blocking legit requests is a very, very rare event. The benefits of blocking spambots, email address harvesters, and even the occasional script kiddie do, IMO, outweigh that downside.

HTH

bye, Dirk