Bad Behavior 2 Roadmap Update

This is the second of a series of updates on the roadmap to Bad Behavior 2, the next major version of the Web’s premier link spam killer.

I complained last time that I hadn’t yet received a copy of ExpressionEngine and wouldn’t be able to delay development of Bad Behavior much longer to wait for it. Well, this afternoon, the long-awaited beta copy of EE 1.4 arrived in my inbox, and so I’ll be spending the weekend looking at it and seeing what all needs to be done for a port.

Unfortunately, every host platform is somewhat different, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that installation for some platforms is going to be hairy at best, but compared to other plugins for those same platforms, about average.

I’ve had to drop the idea of using a PHP class for Bad Behavior’s tests, as it simply was too slow. Classes will still be used for certain host platforms that require them or where it will benefit, for the glue layer, but the core itself will be a set of callable functions.

I have been able to reduce the number of global variables used, though; the only thing global that’s particularly needed are the server globals anyway. Everything else can be passed around. This carries a slight performance penalty, but it’s much cleaner code, and you won’t notice a few microseconds here and there.

In other news, I’ve been busier than expected with trying to work on things that actually pay me money, of which Bad Behavior is only rarely such a thing. That also tends to delay development somewhat, as I generally don’t pull all-nighters anymore, for instance.

I’ve also been tossing around the idea of creating an alternative to Akismet, Matt Mullenweg’s commercial spam screening service. Because the API is open, anyone could (assuming the proper know-how) create their own service that talks to the Akismet plugin.

It isn’t all that hard to set up such a service, but as Matt found out, it does have to be funded somehow. So he went with a commercial model based on obtaining WordPress API keys… I can’t do that.

So if you’re interested in seeing a noncommercial Akismet replacement service, click here.

Anyway, I’m preparing to spend most of the weekend working on Bad Behavior. Feel free to leave your comments below. Nice holiday wishes are appreciated, too. After all, most of you missed my birthday…