A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how wonderful the Drupal BadBehavior module is.  In that post I mentioned how important it is to keep an eye on your BadBehavior logs to make sure that desirable visitors are not being blocked.  Being someone that (sometimes) practices what I preach, I started keeping a close eye on my BadBehavior logs again and was shocked to find that many new IP’s belonging to Google were being blocked.  I know for sure that no Google IP’s were being blocked a year or so ago when I first started using this module, so I’m guessing these are new IP ranges for Google. (See what happens when you don’t keep a close eye on your logs?!)

If you find that Google or other desirable IP’s are being blocked by the BadBehavior module, don’t panic.  You can “whitelist” the IP’s by adding them to the file ‘BAD-BEHAVIOR-WHITELIST.PHP’, located in your BadBehavior install directory.

To add an IP to the whitelist, make a backup of your bad-behavior-whitelist.php file, then open the file and scroll-down past all the DANGER!! warnings until you find this line:
$wp_bb_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(

Below that you will find a few examples of whitelisted IP’s commented-out with the “//” in front of them.  To add a new IP to your whitelist, just enter a new line in the same format as the example:

"64.233.172.28",

Be SURE to include the quotation marks around the IP and the comma at the end of the line -  then save the file and upload to your server.  Verify you didnt make a mistake by viewing a few un-cached pages.  If you made a mistake (like if you forgot the comma at the end of the line) you will be greeted with a broken-website and some very ugly PHP errors.  If that happens, just re-upload your backup file, then double-check your syntax.  If you didn’t make any mistakes the IP added should now be white-listed – but don’t forget to keep checking those logs..