Bad Behavior Port to ModX is on my wishlist

I know there are some comment/form spam solutions for ModX but eventually we’ll all need something industrial strength, and Michael Hampton’s plugin, which works with WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal and others, is a great solution. If anyone has the skills I’d love to see it ported for ModX. Michael’s a talented coder and a very nice guy, so I’m sure if he has some time he’d help the effort.

Bad Behavior

I am not convinced by the general premise. What does it actually do with messages it thinks are spam? I could not find out.

I think you’d get a better answer from Michael rather than me. I can tell you this. I went from hundreds of comment spams a day to approximately one to two dozen simply by activating it on my blog. And I’ve only had one "false positive" that I know about.

I can absolutely see how it reduces comments, my concern is entirely over the false positives. As far as I can tell that false positive will have been entirely unable to view any pages that contained Bad Behavior - one wonders how other false positives might contact you.

Essentially, this thing has a black list of user agents and a white list of IPs and denies access to the page if the user agent looks like a spambot. There’s possibly also some business with referer checking. All sensible approaches at denying access to a website - which is slightly different than I was expecting from the opening post.

Integrating with MODx is therefore quite like getting some stats packages integrated into MODx - ie it may involve hacking index.php and may need tweaks to avoid conflicts.

In fact, it would seem overall that it would logically integrate with stats - the real merit of Michael’s work is the data that he has collected and the methodology; it could possibly be done more efficiently for a MODx solution.

Personally I would prefer to have the "trusted/not-trusted" available to MODx to deal with and redirect accordingly - and I would like to see a shade of gray whereby suspect user agents were unable to contribute to a site but were able to view key parts of a site (eg everything except forms and email addresses).

PaulGregory, I’m not one to understand much of what goes on backend, which is why I made a request on the wishlist rather than doing it myself. My concern is that I and my clients build high traffic sites. Now, ModX is still a relatively young web app, but it’s starting to catch a lot of buzz. As it does, then sites built with it will be targeted by these sorts of ’bots (and I’ve seen one in action, it’s awful.) So it’s only a matter of time before this type of solution will be needed (desperately.) The sooner the better. And if you’ve got ideas to make it better, either within bad behavior itself or specifically for ModX if you (or others) decide that yes, you’ll port it to ModX, then all I can say is God Bless You.

Michael is a webguy who has my respect as a professional, and his solution works very, very well. he’s also a helluva nice guy. I’m sure any contributions back to the codebase, and suggestions on different approaches to handling things, will be accepted graciously, though I hear Beer and Pizza are met with a more enthusiastic welcome.