UPDATE: OK, for the moment I give up on Bad Behavior. If you tried to get on the site yesterday and couldn’t, please leave a comment below telling me what happened and what your OS/browser/anti-virus software combo is. Let’s see if we can narrow this down.
If you can’t access the blog you should still be able to read this. (If you’re seeing this on the blog, you’re not experiencing the problem this techy bugfix post is addressing, so please feel free to ignore.)
I’ve just installed Bad Behavior to combat spammers. Very occasionally it blocks legitimate users as well, usually because of a dodgy browser configuration, or because it detects a worm/virus riding along in your browser. BB is supposed to serve up an explanatory error message that will provide links to how you can solve the problem for yourself.
If you have any problem at all, please email me through the contact page on my webdev site, VIVidWeb.
Categories: technology
ATO scammer time of the year again for Aussies 
Link OTD: DIY Feminist Cybersecurity 
For those times when actually blocking someone on FB is socially awkward 
Unhappy data retention day 
Hoyden About Town 
What about badly behaved legitimate users?
Why, oh why, won’t somebody consider the needs of the naughty?
@ Liam:
Horrible, naughty, no-good, Very Bad Liam!
OK, a comment expanding on the latest update above: a day without the hundreds of spams we usually receive was most restful, but our comments were also way down, so I’m assuming that lots of people couldn’t see the site, thought we were down and went elsewhere.
Only 4 people actually let me know that they were having problems (of a sort that BB isn’t supposed to have) and I couldn’t find their IPs in the admin logs as having been blocked, so that was weird.
Tell me your tales of woe, anyone who couldn’t see us yesterday, please.
Our sitemeter logs show yesterday as down by about 350 visitors and 1000 pageviews from our average. That represents a drop of approx 21% on visits and 33% on pageviews. Fairly significant.
Yes. You’ve been AWOL for about24 hours for me both at home (OSX, Firefox) and at work (XP, IE6*).
No error message, but then, no page returned in the browser either.
*Setup presented without comment.
@ Liam:
How did you comment on the thread yesterday then?
The writer of the BB plugin can’t see the site STILL, even though I’ve disabled BB.
I think my caching plugin might also be setting up errors, even though changing the permalink format was supposed to sort those out. Sigh.
Intermittently AWOL, I should say. (Feels like I’ve been caught out of my alibi by Miss Marple).
And, I should add, he deserved it, the old swine. I’d have poisoned him with curare even if I wasn’t likely to inherit the Manor.
I prefer to use foxglove tea.
Apparently at least one person still can’t get on. Back to the drawing board!
ETA: have now disabled the caching plugin (after clearing the cache) let’s see what happens now!
I couldn’t get the site to load yesterday. I’m using Mac OS 10.5 and Opera.
I have xp and firefox and use freebie AVG.
Kubuntu 8.04 and Firefox 3. I could read everything fine in Google reader, but couldn’t open the originals when I clicked the links.
Came here yesterday for my favourite feminists deconstruction of the Pauline Hanson debacle.
Was sorely disappointed. Total white page though it said I was here. XP, Mozilla, Free AVG.
Glad to have you back anyways.
Wouldn’t load at all for me, on Windows XP/Firefox 3.07/not running any active anti-virus stuff (plays havoc with City of Heroes).
@ tennisisevil (is it really?),
sorry to disappoint, but the Hanson photos don’t interest me particularly. They have nothing at all to do with her current political views.
If it was her, a few saucy photos taken when she was young are innocuous, and if it isn’t her in the photos, then it’s a big fuss over even less. The person who sold them to the papers, no matter how down on his luck, is pretty despicable, of course.
XP, firefox, and avast
same deal as Liam…
Ubutnu and firefox. Could read individual articles (if linked) but not site.
Hmm. Variety of responses, some of which are leaning me towards thinking that it might have been the caching plugin rather than the BB anti-spam plugin that was causing the problems.
I might leave it a couple of days and then just try BB again on its own.
Explorer v6.0 Only getting blank white pages yesterday and this morning, although browser says “Done”
Imagine my relief to have Hoyden back again tonight 🙂
Firefox, Mac – haven’t missed a thing…. I have been able to click through from my feedreader (Google) to every post, and to load them independently.
Mac OSX 10.4.11, Firefox 3.0.7, AdBlock Plus; every page yesterday was blank (except ones that were in my cache). “View source” showed total blanks. No 404s. Adblock showed no blockable elements, and since it was a blank page, well, duh. 🙂