Warning: this post has nothing to do with weight loss, health, or fitness.

Are you a blogger running the Wordpress platform? Are you also using the Bad Behavior plugin? If you are, I suggest you upgrade to the newest version of Bad Behavior immediately so that you don’t suffer through what I did yesterday: being locked out of my own blog and unable to post, geez!

I was able to login to the admin area of my blog however when I tried to save the changes I made to the post I was working on I received a 403 error page stating that my IP had been blacklisted (!) and expected of malicious or illegal activity. It said that I might be able to fix the problem myself by downloading Google Pack and running virus and spyware tests, gave me a (support) key, and even listed my personal email address to contact to fix the problem. Well it certainly wasn’t going to help me to email myself (LOL), because I didn’t know what the problem was!

I thought the 403 error was generated from my site host Dreamhost so I contacted support. They ended up referring me to a new post by Joseph at Mustech and then I upgraded Bad Behavior this morning (yeah!). It was quite an experience because I thought that I’d picked up a horrific virus or piece of malware somehow and just couldn’t stomach that my IP had been listed as suspicious and was on an IP blacklist.

If you want to know why this happened you can read Michael’s rundown on his server move (he’s the developer of Bad Behavior), which is where you need to go anyway to get the updated plugin version.

I hope this post saves you some time if you are going through the same issue I was. It’s an easy fix but without an indication on the error page you might not know it was an issue with Bad Behavior. Now there could have been a clue if I’d checked the source code of the error page but I didn’t do that.

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