BadBehaviour – super-quick response for bug in open source spam-blocker software

I’m darn impressed at Michael Hampton’s quick response to a bug in his excellent anti-spam BadBehaviour plug-in:

“Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.”

I wouldn’t expect a commercial outfit to apologise, explain the issue and release a bug-fix in two days – let alone an unpaid sw author who does it for the love of it. I pinged Michael a PayPal donation by way of thanks, as did a few others. Roll on the gift economy.

If your MediaWiki (that’s the one behind WikiPedia) suffers from spam then I strongly recommend BadBehaviour.