The Knitting Fiend

Ok, I’m probably kicked out of nearly all the web rings I joined. Sigh . . .

If you manage a “Ring Surf” web ring, or have joined one and use “Bad Behavior” to filter spam, you may want to read this. I explain a problem and a solution.

If you look at the bottom of my blog, you will see I have joined a number or web rings. These are fun, and help people find interesting blogs all about knitting. I also manage a ring, which lead me to discover a little problem. When I visited ring surf to manage the machine knitting ring, I discovered that my blog had been taken out of the ring and put into a list of “blogs of interest”.

That was weird because I hadn’t done it.

I investigated further. Examining blogs of interest, I discovered these were all blogs the ring surf robot had “tested” and found wanting. Reasons they might be found wanting include: 1) Not adding the code to the main page, 2) posting an incomplete code or 3) failing to respond to the robot.

Well, of course a few pages didn’t have the code in the correct place or posted it incorrectly. That happens all the time. Lots of fresh enthusiastic bloggers apply to rings, but don’t yet know how to paste a code it. I try to email those people and give them further instructions. Most figure it out, and I let them in.

But, I had the correct code installed. “What gives?”, I thought.

So, I looked for info. I couldn’t find anything.

Finally, it occurred to me:
Let me run an auto check, and look recent visitors on Cpanel! I’ll see if I’m rejecting something.

I ran the auto check a few times, and “Voila!”, I discovered the problem.

Here it is:

Host: 69.93.30.58

/blog/
Http Code: 412 Date: Sep 24 09:51:15 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in Bytes: 2568
Referer: -
Agent: Lynx/2.8.4rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.7c

Turns out IP address 69.93.30.58 is ring surf’s bot. And I knew the only reason anyone gets a “Code: 412″ is if my spam plug-in “Bad Behavior” boots them! That’s not what I want, but luckily, I could fix the problem.

How? I white listed “69.93.30.58″ in ‘bad-behavior-whitelist.php’ module. Specifically, I added the uncommented line containing “69.93.30.58″, below:
$wp_bb_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(
// “10.0.0.0/8″,
// “172.16.0.0/12″,
// “192.168.0.0/16″,
// “127.0.0.1″,
“69.93.30.58″, // ring surf
);

Afterwards, I returned to RingSurf.com the auto check, and this is key: I passed.

Now, I need to email all the ring managers and make sure I’m still in! Sigh. . .