Bad Behavior/Digg Conflict

A problem and a fix.

This morning, while experimenting with a Digg link on my personal blog, I got an unusual message from Digg saying:

This link does not appear to be a working link. Please check the URL and try again.

Huh?

The link, of course, was fine. It was a link to the home page of my site.

Why is this a big deal? Well, being “dugg” can increase the amount of attention your Web site gets among blog readers. A well-dugg post can attract many, many hits. Some of those people might turn into regular readers.

(You can read my experiences with being dugg here and here. Although things can get a bit out of control when you end up on Digg’s home page, I lived through it without any permanent damage.)

Since I was on Digg, I decided to do a Digg search for the error message. The article I found, “Bad Behavior 2.0.11 WordPress Plugin Blocking Digg Submission” on GeekTeks.com answered my question and provided a fix.

Apparently, when the author of Bad Behavior updated his plugin and spam site references, Digg was blocked as a legitimate site. The solution is to add Digg’s IP address to Bad Behavior’s whitelist. I just did this on all sites running Bad Behavior and the problem has gone away.

Miraz and I highly recommend Bad Behavior in our WordPress book. It not only helps prevent spam comments from being posted to your WordPress blog, but it also reduces the amount of hits to your MySQL database, thus reducing site congestion and theoretically speeding up access to your site.

Do you use Bad Behavior 2.0.11? If so, read the above-referenced article and follow its instructions to fix the problem.