I use a WordPress plugin known as Bad Behavior on No Man’s Blog.  According to the plugin documentation:

Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referrer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.

During the past couple of days, however, the plugin has been playing nasty games with me.  I did a little Google search to see if I could figure out what was going on and came upon this disturbing missive on the Bad Behavior developer’s Web page:

All users should update to Bad Behavior 2.0.11 immediately to prevent being blocked from your own site.

Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.

[…]

Some people have asked for more details on what exactly happened. In brief, yesterday I moved all of my sites to a new dedicated server. In the process, I decommissioned an old blacklist I was running which I thought wasn’t being used, not realizing that Bad Behavior was still set to use it. Shortly afterward, I found myself locked out of my own blog, just as you all did. So therefore, this release.  [Emphasis added.]

Holy cow.  It scared the crap out of me!

Technorati Tags: WordPress, plugin, Bad Behavior, No Man’s Blog, PHP, script, spambots, HTTP, User-Agent, Referrer, Google search, developer’s Web page, third party, blacklist, false positives, IP address

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