My post the other day about Windows Live Writer attracted a notable comment from Shannon Whitley with the solution to a show-stopping bug in using this excellent offline blog editor with WordPress (and maybe other platforms, too).

The bug in question arises if you use WLW beta 2 and you have the Bad Behavior anti-spam plugin activated.

If you do, you’ll get an error like this whenever you try to publish a post to your blog:

The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden

As a result, you will not be able to publish your post.

That’s exactly what I experienced yesterday – I had reinstalled the BB plugin and didn’t connect that with the WLW issue until Shannon pointed it out.

So I’ve implemented James McKay’s fix – which involves editing the PHP code in one of the BB files on the server – and this post will be the acid test as to whether it’s successful or not…

[Edit] Yep, it works!

5 responses to “Fix for Windows Live Writer bug”

  1. Rob Safuto avatar

    Thanks Neville. I was stuck on that issue and had given up on WLW because of it.

  2. neville avatar

    I would have done the same, Rob, if Shannon hadn’t come to the rescue.

    Surprises me that the WLW site has no reference to the bug fix.

  3. Joe Cheng [MSFT] avatar

    Neville, we’ve put all WordPress-WLW issues on this page:

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Windows_Live_Writer_Help

    And please either e-mail me or stop by our friendly forums if you have any trouble in the future. We’ve got solutions for lots of configuration issues like these!

    http://groups.msn.com/windowslivewriter

  4. neville avatar

    Thanks, Joe. I do participate in the WLW forum. It’s just that I ranted here rather than there :)

  5. […] did already apply the BB fix after learning of an issue with that plugin, WP and […]