(Updated below.)

I run several wikis under my Dreamhost account. About a year ago, I was getting absolutely crushed under the weight of spambots. After one particularly bad attack that took about 3 hours to clean up, I discovered Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior is a spam-fighting extension for MediaWiki, WordPress, Drupal, Geeklog, and DotClear. I haven’t tried it on the other platforms, but for my MediaWiki sites, it’s been a real godsend. I just unzipped the file into my extensions directory, added a short line of code to the end of LocalSettings.php, and sat back and did nothing! My spam problem was gone.

A couple of nights ago, I upgraded one of my wiki sites to the latest version of MediaWiki, and immediately encountered a “Call to undefined function” error with Bad Behavior. I updated BB to the latest version, but to no avail. The site would work with the extension disabled, but that’s no way to run a wiki. The problem, apparently, lies in a sort of perfect storm of the particular versions of MediaWiki (1.9.2), Bad Behavior (2.0.10), and PHP (5.1.2). Dreamhost hasn’t yet updated to PHP 5.2. If they had (or if I wanted to tackle that job myself), this likely wouldn’t be an issue.

Fortunately, however, there is a pretty easy solution. Thanks to commenter Brian Hartvigsen on the Bad Behavior blog, I found that the answer was to add the following line to LocalSettings.php:

This goes at the top your LocalSettings file, just below require_once( "includes/DefaultSettings.php" );
. Here’s a picture, so you can see what I mean:

Note that this does apparently cause some formatting problems with the edit page of the wiki, but I decided that I could live with the minor glitches; I couldn’t live with the spam.

Hope that helps anyone else who’s having this issue.

UPDATE 2-21-07: Dreamhost is now upgrading to PHP 5.2.1, so this will likely cease to be an issue. So, something else will probably break. Guess I know what I’m doing this evening…

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