One of the plugins for WordPress that I’ve used for ages is Bad Behaviour.
Along with Akismet, this plugin is at the front line of defence against spam and other ugly stuff that hits your blog on a regular basis.
As with all plugins that I regard as essential, I tend to upgrade to the latest version as soon as I know there is one.
This was the case with BB 2.0.1.3, released in late January, which I installed the other day.
Then I noticed this paragraph in the text explaining fixes in this update:
A bug in Bad Behavior’s user agent blacklist code caused blacklist matches to become case-insensitive, when they should have been case-sensitive. Among other things, this caused pingbacks and trackbacks sent from WordPress blogs to fail. This has been fixed.
Bold emphasis is mine.
Wtf? Now I know the answer to something that’s been bothering me for the past month or so, which is that I got the feeling that outbound trackbacks just weren’t working.
A good test of that is when you write a post with a link to a published post in your own blog. In my WP blogs, that always generates a trackback.
But I’ve not seen any since around Jan 18 when I upgraded BB to the then-latest version 2.0.1.2.
And which means that the 40 or so posts I’ve written since then in my main blog which include lots of links to other blogs and websites, not a single trackback went to any of those places.
That is a real bummer. At least the bug is now fixed but I’m disappointed in BB.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
You would do better to be disappointed in the author who made the stupid typo which caused that problem. :-\
Thanks for stopping by, Michael. You fixed it, that’s the main thing!
Hi Neville, I’ve upgraded Bad Behavior and Wordpress to their latest versions and things have slowed down to the point of annoying. Anything I do that requires an update to the database (commenting, posting, editing a file in the theme editor) takes around 20 seconds (as opposed to 4 seconds with the plugin deactivated). I’m wondering whether you have the same problems?