Bad-Behavior MediaWiki Plugin Fix

If you use MediaWiki to power your wiki, you’ve probably heard of the Bad-Behavior plugin to help fight spam.

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 Referer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.

I was all for it after I read the description as well as the functions it adds to one’s wiki.  So, I did the following:

1.   Downloaded it like so:

wget http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/download/bad-be…

2.   Unzipped it with the -a option (for ASCII mode):

unzip -a bad-behavior-2.0.10.zip

3.   Copied the whole folder to /path-to-wiki/extensions

cp -R /path-to-wiki/extensions

4.   Edited LocalSettings.php an added the following line at the end of the file:

include( ‘./extensions/Bad-Behavior/bad-behavior-mediawiki.php’ );

The include statement above should’ve worked where a new table would’ve been added in my MediaWiki DB, but this did not happen, and when clicking on any link, I would just get a blank page.

My HTTPD logs also showed “undefined variable” errors, so after searching for fixes, I found that the following line had to be added just below the require_once(“includes/DefaultSettings.php”) line to resolve the issues. 

Apparently, you’ll need this if you’re using a certain combination of Apache-PHP-MediaWiki versions:

require_once( “includes/DatabaseFunctions.php” );

I restarted Apache and all worked fine.  You can also add the Bad-Behavior 2 Extended extension if you’d like, which I did.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.