Extension talk:Bad Behavior

I'm wondering if anyone can testify to how effective this extension has been? Thanks! - John

I've been running this on my wiki for the last several months. On the plus side it's easy to install, mostly transparent, and reduces referral spam by at least 90%. On the minus side, I've had at least a couple of people get blocked by it, probably others that never bothered to tell me, and its block messages do tend to be kind of harsh and confusing to any human that might get blocked ("I know you, spammer, and I don't like you!", or some such).

I am using the BB extension on a low traffic wiki. You can see the activity log here: where you can sort or search. (BB doesn't come with a report option so I set up my own with AppGini.) I am using the verbose mode. You can configure the log table to store only denied requests. The log is trimmed automatically after 7 days. I am not confident about the non-transparent logic for denial of service. When I posted a question about a denial of service on the author's bulletin board, his answer was rather demeaning and non-specific (subtext: "Don't bug me with trivia.")
 * --jwalling 23:00, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

The author doesn't maintain a bulletin board, nor does he post specific details about Bad Behavior's design in public where spammers can read them. Try e-mail... --Error 12:10, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

BB 2.0.6 effects MW 1.7.1 GUI
Hi, I know at least one other person has this problem. With BB 2.0.6 and MW 1.7.1 certain very minor changes happen on the mediawiki user interface. On any edit page there is a new-line after minor edit and watch page checkboxes. And there is a new line in RecentChanges after Below are the last 50 changes in the last 7 days, as of 10:39, 29 September 2006. and Hide minor edits | Show bots | Hide anonymous users | Hide logged-in users | Hide my edits Where there previously wasn't. Just reporting so other users know it's not just them. I'll see if I can find whats causing it myself. If anyone else finds out, great! --mw:User:Rick 09:45, 29 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I've tracked down the error to a line in bad-behavior-mediawiki.php If you edit out a line in function bb2_mediawiki_timer, which is probably around line 121 it stops the newlines.
 * The line to edit out is  $text = "" . $text;
 * I haven't had any negative effects from editing it out, yet, and if I understand write the line is only a reporting method, and has no other functionality. It seems the presence of inserting any text here causes the MW parser to insert extra into the source code. I don't know why.
 * --mw:User:Rick 11:45, 29 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Confirming this fix worked for me as well, thanks! Running MW 1.16.4
 * --24.228.255.37 21:22, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

BB broken with MW 1.9.1
So with MW 1.9.1 and 2007 02 02 I had to disable BB on my Wiki as it is broken. Any suggestions?



"Try adding require_once( "$IP/includes/DatabaseFunctions.php" ); to bad-behavior-mediawiki.php ; that fixed it for me. "

This solution worked for me. Sy Ali 19:08, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

sql queries are not postres compatible
this extension uses the database only for it's logging functionality. so main part of a "workaround" is to disable loging in the conf file. second you have to comment out the sql querries in the file bad-behavior/bad-behavior/housekeeping.inc.php (use // in front of every $query = ... and bb2_db_query($query); line). nuess0r

I have a user-submitted PostgreSQL patch which I'll be rolling out in the next few days. --Error28 08:12, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Still broken in new versions
No fix for new versions of Mediawiki that don't have DatabaseFunctions.php? The latest Bad Behaviour does not have the above call.
 * Including includes/DatabaseFunctions.php is no longer necessary as of Bad Behavior 2.2. --Error28 (talk) 22:51, 13 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I haven't been able to get it to work either, following both the simple instructions on the download site and the more detailed (but obsolete, judging by the comments above) instructions in the readme.txt (found in the download). Using MediaWiki 1.18.2, PHP 5.3.13, MySQL 5.1.39-log...
 * Possibly there's a step not mentioned in the instructions because there are only 3 fairly simply defined steps described, and there's not a lot of room for misunderstanding (except the location of settings.ini, but I was able to find that out from the configurations page)? This is the error message I received:
 * Thanks for any help. -kotra (talk) 04:56, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for any help. -kotra (talk) 04:56, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Account creation
Does this extension instantly block spambots, or does it prevent them from making accounts? I know a number of wikis that have spambot problems, and this could help, but only if it prevents account creation by spambots. 69.143.82.2 21:31, 24 September 2012 (UTC)