Nagle just dropped me an email saying that he was getting a 403 error when trying to leave a comment. I checked around and I was getting a 403 error when I tried to get to the admin panel to find out what was going on. It freaked me out. I thought something/someone had blacklisted me from my own blog.
Apparently, the anti-spam plugin “Bad Behavior” likes to randomly ban IP addresses. It took the combined power of the tech-support guy at my host, myself and a heavy bit of googling to figure that out. I’ve got to hand it to the guys at my hosting company though, he went above and beyond trying to figure it out for me.
So, the solution was to FTP in, delete that plugins folder, which removes it from WP, and fire up the WP admin panel to make sure everything was ok. I tested it by installing the plugin again. Sure enough, soon as I did the entire world was banned for “malicious activity”. Maybe it’s a problem with the latest WP install, who knows. I’m just glad we got it figure out.
Oh yeah! It seems that this theme isn’t compatible with 2.3. Swell. &*$(#@)*$!@#$#!!!!!!!!
you can’t whitelist yourself, at least?
Actually, Bad Behavior doesn’t have a “local” black/whitelist, or any way to customize it. They had a 3rd party list (spamhaus I think). Apparently what happened is that the list started sending out false positives so it was just banning everyone. It affected a ton of blogs. It’s the #2 issue on the WP forums at the moment, right behind a huge bug from upgrading to the latest version. So, basically, I got the two biggest WP bugs at the same time. Just my luck.