About two months ago, I installed Bad Behavior for Drupal to ward of some of the spam that was plaguing my site. I had previously installed spam.module to hide spam when it was posted. Bad Behavior tries to prevent spam from being posted at all. I can tell you that Bad Behavior has greatly reduced the amount of spam posted to my site, but not without costly side-effects.
A couple weeks after I installed Bad Behavior, I got an e-mail from an Opera user that was having problems accessing my site. He was getting HTTP 412 errors when browsing to the site and was also having problems with my RSS feed. I looked into it and found that Bad Behavior was blocking him because it was expecting an HTTP header that wasn't present in his page request. We never found the root of the problem, but it definitely seemed like it was out of his control.
At the time, I decided that a user here or there that couldn't access my site was an acceptable causality of my personal war on spam. Here's what I told him:
The war on spam is a balance of inconvenience. I have information I want to present to others. Others want that information. Still others are trying to feed off our desire to spread information. Some might say it's my responsibility to keep my site clear of such rubbish. To do so, I must make hard decisions based on time (cleaning up spam), money (increased hosting costs becwause of bots trawling my site), and the quality of my site (if spam is visible and for how long). Weighing these factors, I decided to install Bad Behavior. I've already seen a drop in spam, so it's paid off. Additionally, you're the first one that's complained. I'd rather deal with complaints one-by-one and try to improve Bad Behavior than deal with spam as I was before.
That might sound a bit high and mighty, but it's how I felt at the time.
I've since periodically browsed my Bad Behavior logs and found a lot of requests from spam bots, but also a lot of requests that looked pretty innocent. When I came across a post in the Opera forums about problems accessing my site this morning, I decided it was time for a change. A couple days ago, I installed comment_closer.module, which closes old comments after a specified period of time. That should help cut down on spam. As of this posting, I've disabled Bad Behavior, so no one should have problems accessing my site now. I decided there are too many legitimate requests being blocked.
Spam on my site is the same as unsolicited phone calls or mail: it's a pain to put up with, but we do it because we want the legitimate phone calls and mail. I want people to have access to the information here and that's more valuable to me than dealing with the current load of spam. I'll see how it goes without Bad Behavior for a bit. Hopefully I won't need to do anything else just yet.
To anyone that has had problems accessing my site over the past two months: I'm sorry, that was never my intention. And welcome back!
Note: Comments with a light blue background were made by the site owner.
uh...
hey, buddy, your site done went crazy! it looks all spifferific when i reply, but on the main page, everythin' 's a bit spacey (aka spaced funkily). those of us what don't like the left-right scrollbar thingy is a-pleadin' witcha to put it back the way it once were. puh-lease?
That would mean you're using
That would mean you're using a browser that doesn't support
white-space: pre-wrap. Unfortunately, since your browser also most likely doesn't do proper CSS error handling (i.e. I fixed the problem in Mozilla), there's nothing I can do. You'll have to wait until that post falls off the front page.well,
fine, then. see if ie-ers don't pommel you with whining. (okay, so as i was typing that, i was wondering whether it's slightly sacreligious of me to look at your site using ie. if so, i apologize, my excuses being that i'm lazy, i don't like change, and i'm lazy.)
p.s. hurry up and post more so i don't hafta scroll all the way over there => just to read.