Blog problem solved

BEFORE anyone begins to accuse us of “censorship” (well, one already unfairly did so in the shoutbox), we’d like to inform our blog followers that a glitch in a plugin we use to block spam was the culprit for the sudden halt in blog activity yesterday.

The plugin is called Bad Behavior. But instead of blocking just spam, it also blocked us from our own site, saying that our IP address is “listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity.” As we’ve learned from the plugin’s author Michael Hampton today, WordPress bloggers using the plugin have been experiencing the problem for the past two days since yesterday.

“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,” explained Hampton, who also found himself locked out of his own blog. This, after he moved all of his sites to a new dedicated server, in the process decommissioning an old blacklist he was running that was still being referred to by Bad Behavior.

We’ve updated the plugin to the new version Hampton released that fixes this problem. So you may all start posting your comments on the blog again.

Just a word to those who are rash in their malicious conclusions — we don’t do that sort of thing here.