I learned the hard way yesterday that something had gone wrong with the generally well-behaved Bad Behavior plugin. Bad Behavior is a very neat idea: it blocks many automated spammers from even seeing your blog, let alone leaving spam comments. However, when Bad Behavior wouldn’t let me into my own WordPress admin panel, yeah, that was a pretty good clue that something was up.
Then I couldn’t get into a client blog I was working on. Then I couldn’t get into another of my blogs. In each case, I manually “whitelisted” my IP address in order to get into the admin panel and disable the plugin. Not the end of the world but not very convenient, either.
Naturally, I checked the plugin’s homepage. Nothing. Fortunately, I checked it again this morning and found that a fixed version of the plugin has been released. The cause of the problem was a simple mistake, the kind any developer can make (and the kind we all pray we’ll somehow miraculously avoid!), and the solution is simply to upgrade your plugin.
If you are currently locked out of your admin panel, just upgrade the plugin via FTP (or have your web developer do it) and you should be back in business.