Installed two new plugins today: Ryan’s WordPress Contact Form and IO Error’s Bad Behavior Plugin.

You can see the Contact Form Plugin in use on my “Contact” page. The Bad Behavior Plugin works behinds the scenes, analyzing “incoming requests to your server. If they match a profile of a known spambot, the spammer gets a nice error message instead of your blog.” The error message gives the viewer a list of conditions for access to my server.

I asked IO Error if the plugin affects Google bots. The answer:

Of course. Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp, msnbot, and pretty much any other search engine bot are completely unaffected.

During testing we found that a few less-well-known search engine bots were matching profiles because they were trying to look similar to some other user-agent (MSIE, or in one case, Konqueror). The code recognizes them and allows these search engine bots to pass through unaffected.

Sounds good to me. My old site, soon to be retired, attracted a lot of spam. I’m hoping to start fresh.

Many thanks to IO Error and Ryan Duff.

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