Bad Behavior 2 Roadmap Update
November 29th, 2005 by Michael Hampton
About a month ago I posted a roadmap for the next major version of Bad Behavior, the PHP-based automated link spam killer. Now it’s time for an update.
First off, I mentioned in a comment on a prior post that I would be waiting to see the next version of ExpressionEngine before I went very far with the next version. Though I was told a beta would be available in November, I have yet to see it. If I don’t see it in the next few days, Bad Behavior will move forward, without support for ExpressionEngine.
Second, I have the basic structure of Bad Behavior laid out. It consists of two components: a core consisting of the test suite itself, and a glue component for each host platform. I’m also planning an administrative interface that will hook into each host platform, though I am not sure if this will be ready for all platforms at the time of release. Finally you’ll be able to configure Bad Behavior and view its activity within WordPress, MediaWiki, or whatever platform.
Third, the architecture is in place for Bad Behavior to show more informative error messages, each one including a unique key which either the user or the blog admin can look up to determine what went wrong and how to fix it. While all of the keys have been set, the documentation for each remains to be written. Bad Behavior will now serve errors such as 400 and 403, depending on the request, rather than 412.
And I’m experimenting with automated methods of detecting spam attack runs which may originate from dozens of different IP addresses and have somewhat different signatures. I may call for some assistance with this in the near future, and this isn’t likely to make it into 2.0, but it is in the works.
Finally, this post wouldn’t be complete without a mention of something strange that happened when I posted last month:
Without any further contributions to Bad Behavior development, I’ll work on it in my limited free time, and it’ll take somewhere around six months. If I were to receive, for instance, $500 in contributions, I could devote a significant amount of time to it, and complete it within the next month. Hey, don’t laugh, that’s only a few cents per user.
I didn’t expect to receive much of anything, and I had just picked the number out of thin air. The surprise was that I actually received $490! Clearly I didn’t complete it within a month, but that’s mostly due to my decision to wait for ExpressionEngine. I’m not waiting on them any longer, so you should expect an early Christmas present sometime within the next couple of weeks.
Be sure and review the roadmap and comment on it now, before I go too far and any necessary design changes become difficult or impossible.
And I wouldn’t mind if you want to contribute that last $10 either. It is my birthday, after all. 