March 24, 2005
Trackback Spam
The past month or so, I've been receiving a shit ton of trackback spam on this blog. I have trackbacks disabled, so they don't show up on any of my pages, but MovableType still accepts the trackbacks, which results in an email being sent to me. Based on a recommendation from Josh , I've installed MT-TrackbackAntiSpam , and the amount of trackback spam has fallen to zero. Now maybe I can turn trackback display back on...
Posted by Dirtae at March 24, 2005 11:18 PMI think trackbacks are one of those technologies that seems to have failed utterly. The reason (it seems to me) is that the most popular blog packages require explicit action on the part of the author of the article to enter trackback info. So if I want to track back to your article in my MT 2.6 installation, I need to figure out what your trackback URI is (which can be an adventure in itself) and then type it in, yadda yadda yadda.
The only package I know of that seems to get this exactly right ("Magically figure out who I referenced and automatically send them trackbacks") is blogs.msdn.com. Which I don't use.
In the year or so that my blog has been up, I've gotten -- maybe -- 5 or 6 'real' trackbacks. But there are maybe 50 articles that point to mine according to Technorati. So basically, I'm OK with using Technorati to figure out who is referencing me, rather than trackbacks.
Posted by: peterb at March 25, 2005 07:53 AMI disagree that it's failed. My MT installations automatically pick up trackback URLs. I only manually enter them for my own site.
Posted by: Erik J. Barzeski at March 25, 2005 01:04 PM
