Sean Feeney
Architect of the digital age

PHP Spam Blocker

8 April 2007

Bad Behavior is designed to integrate into your PHP-based Web site, running as early as possible to throw out spam bots before they have the opportunity to vandalize your site with their junk, or even to scrape your pages for e-mail addresses and forms to fill out. Not only does Bad Behavior block actual vandalism to your site, it also blocks many e-mail address harvesters, resulting in less e-mail spam, and many automated Web site cracking tools, helping to improve your Web site’s security. Bad Behavior runs before your software on each request to your Web site, so if a spam bot does visit, it will receive nothing, and your software never runs. This reduces the amount of server CPU time, database activity and bandwidth spent on processing robots which are just harvesting your site and delivering junk. Bad Behavior rejects spam bots outright, sending an appropriate 4xx error code. This lets you filter them out of your server’s logs when you do log analysis, making them cleaner and more accurate and giving you better insight into the human beings visiting your site, rather than the spammers. Bad Behavior is designed as a platform-independent package which uses a connector to integrate with a given software package (MediaWiki, WordPress, etc.). This lets Bad Behavior run on a very wide variety of Web applications, including personalized custom scripts you may have written. With some Web servers, Bad Behavior can even be used to protect static HTML pages.

Posted in php, Spam Prevention, Website Security