httpbl 8.x-1.x-dev

Development release for Drupal 8.x (It's Alive!)

This initial development release for httpbl (D8) represents a major upgrade and re-write. It was started with a clean slate, however it maintains all the primary functionality that the module has provided since the original D5 version—namely, checking IP addresses during page requests OR comment submissions, against Project Honeypot (.org), and determining whether or not to locally blacklist, grey-list or white-list those IPs based on any found threat scores (or the absence of any scores).

What's new in D8 is that records are now stored as manageable "Host" entities, with a brand new Admin View UI that includes bulk actions, for managing them. You still don't have to manage them, but now, for the first time, you can—without needing any direct access to your database. Httpbl still does what it does best, working quietly in the background to minimize nuisance traffic, but whether you're a control freak or just like seeing how many IPs your site has captured, you now can.

Prudence requires advising this development release not be used in a mission critical production environment, but it is a stable release. There are not yet any automated tests, nor is there any migration path for moving previous installation data from D6 or D7.

For the sake of future planning, it also must be advised that this project will soon, again, be forked, and move in a slightly different direction than it has since at least D6, namely, how it will work with any page-request blocking in Drupal core. In past releases, Httpbl shared its blacklist with whatever table Drupal core was using for banning traffic (the names and methods have been different for D6 and D7), and now in D8 Httpbl still does this cooperatively with the new Ban module. This is going to go away in future releases. The reason is that Drupal banning in the past was not optional, but now it is; you don't have to enable the Ban module. Httpbl proposes that as long as that is true, there is no need to have both Ban and Httpbl running, as both are middleware services doing essentially the same thing with the same, shared list.

But for the time being, we wanted to be able to honestly state that Httpbl does everything it used to do, and more!

The 8.x codebase is also available on Github. There is also a Wiki there that explains more about the current state of this project, and why this module's support for the Ban module will be dropped in the future.