Randem Systems Support Board

03/19/2025 - Version 6.1.00

NEW: BotBanish has bee re-engineered! Better Contact Form Spam Processing.

FIX: Larger areas for Contact Denial Settings.

FIX: Re-introduced data recovery after uninstall.

ADD: New words added to "Contact Form Denial" in BotBanish to be used in the Forbidden words or phrases area.

ADD: Further enhancements of the "Contact Form Denial" rejection processes.

NEW: (WORDPRESS) After plugin activation, the BotBanish "Settings" page will be displayed.

NEW: Many more updates and improvements.

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01/21/2025 - Version 6.0.10

FIX: When re-installing the WordPress options were not saved correctly for Contact Form Protecting.

ADD: Enhanced contact form rejection processes.

FIX: (WordPress) Removed recovery of data after uninstall. Caused timeouts. Will re-introduce in later version.
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01/09/2025 - Version 6.0.09

FIX: (WordPress) After uninstalling (without deleting data), upon re-install exported data will be recovered.
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01/05/2025 - Version 6.0.08

CHG: Made the defaults to country blocking Russia, China and Singapore.

CHG: No email notifications will be sent for country blocking. Too many emails would be generated.

CHG: Improved Backup capabilities.

NEW: Added backup & import capability when installing and uninstalling so that no customer entries to black / white lists will be lost when applying new version or re-installing same version, unless Delete All Data is chosen on uninstall.

CHG: Moved log and backup locations not to be deleted on uninstall unless delete all data is selected on uninstall.

CHG: Improved Contact form email blocking.

CHG: Added more options to contact email blocking.

ADD: Added a menu to the top of the administration page.

CHG: Improved .htaccess file processing.
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12/21/2024 - Version 6.0.00 (Not Compatible with Prior Versions)

CHG: Checked system for server type, (Apache, NGINX, Lighttd, Lightspeed) to determine .htaccess usage.

CHG: Modified procedure for getting client domain name. Sometimes no client domain name was found ending in license not found error.

CHG: Re-ordered alternate BotBanish Servers. Moved faster servers to the front of the search list for clients to connect to.

FIX: Client Table Maintenance was not correctly removing expired entries.

ADD: (WordPress) Ability to check if host has all the needed PHP & Apache modules to successfully run BotBanish.

ADD: Contact pages can be monitored for SPAM and junk messages. These IP's can be blocked from leaving SPAM messages. Determination if a message is SPAM is user controlled.

FIX: When installing with Pretty-URLs partially installed, an error would be thrown on installation. Now a double check is made to insure that all the Pretty-URLs files that are needed for the BotBanish installation are present.

ADD: Deletes debug.log and PHP error files if they get too large. Very large files will occur if WordPress WP_DEBUG is set to true. Some themes use Redux Framework which generates many depreciation messages in PHP 8.x will slow down and run out of space on your server causing it to crash. The generation of messages also make it very hard to debug other plugins due to the gross amount of messages.

CHG: (WordPress) Removed "WORDPRESS" from .htaccess and spider_bad table to allow WordPress sites to access pages.

CHG: Removed URL static processing. All URL processing is now completely dynamic.

CHG: Version 6 is no longer compatible with prior versions. Database and Communications have been changed.

CHG: BotBanish will no longer modify the root .htaccess file when BotBanish is installed in a sub-folder. This is mainly to accommodate staging sites that are installed in sub-folders.

CHG: Moved all BotBanish .htaccess entries to the top of the file. This was done to prevent hanging in WordPress sites and to allow protection to be administered first before any other application that could alter the protection. This is most important in WordPress sites but should be beneficial to other systems as well.

NEW: (WordPress) When installing BotBanish, if the "Contact Form SPAM Denial" plugin is installed and active, BotBanish will automatically deactivate it because BotBanish has the same functionality. When uninstalling BotBanish, the plugin will automatically be re-activated if it is installed.