I've turned off trackbacks on this site because I'm getting about 100 a day, of which a tiny percentage aren't spam.
Too bad. Trackbacks address a real need.
Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 3, 2005 01:04 PM
Comments
Oh those spammers, they are a pain.
A chink of light for me is the SpamLookup plugin for Movable Type which pretty thoroughly heads the bad boys off at the pass with just an occasional false-positive. If you've not tried it, it might be worth a shot, it seems to solve the problem for me.
Hmmm, I'm in the process of cleaning up my comments and trackbacks on way.nu (served by WordPress, which is somewhat better at dealing with comment spam that MoveableType) and doing it as a multipart tutorial: http://way.nu/archives/2005/06/killing-comment-spam/
BUT it is an onerous process and the average blogger doesn't have the time and talent to fix this stuff, allowing the blogosphere be be littered with garbage.
BUT turning off trackbacks isn't the solution - without cross-conversational linking, you aren't bloggging. Without comments, pingback and trackback all cross-conversational links must be manually created, which puts us back into email link-whoring - how 1990s.
Blog tool vendors have not done a good job of getting their heads together and coming up with a solution that is open and works for everyone - too many egos involved. Typekey was a start, but six apart never really moved it forward or made it easy to use. In a way, this really is Google's problem to solve - all of the comment/trackback/pingback spam is an attempt to game google's results. If they were to launch a blogger connected blogging whitelist/blacklist system it would be the defacto standard instantly.
Jonathan, I turned trackbacks off reluctantly for the reasons you say, but they simply are not adding to cross-conversation at this point, at least for my blog. I don't have the time to extirpate TB spam manually. MT-blacklist works well enough on comment spam that I'm not tempted to turn off comments, which would pain me greatly.
How could Google build and maintain its whitelist/blacklist without it in turn being gamed?
Oh, I understand completely WHY you're turning it off. Several of the WordPress content spam plug-ins also address trackback/pingback spam, and you might find some simple solutions that would fix your own MT problem (renaming the trackback cgi, closing trackbacks on older posts, etc.) BUT you are a high value target for spam because of your googlejuice - the bad guys will always win if their technical chops are equal to yours because you have other things you'd prefer to be doing and they are getting paid for spamming.
As for the how of a Google trackback / pingback / comments solution - they have a bezillion dollars, lots of bright engineers and blogger. I posted some more thoughts on how I'd attack it at Way.Nu
Comments
Oh those spammers, they are a pain.
A chink of light for me is the SpamLookup plugin for Movable Type which pretty thoroughly heads the bad boys off at the pass with just an occasional false-positive. If you've not tried it, it might be worth a shot, it seems to solve the problem for me.
Posted by: Johnnie Moore | June 3, 2005 04:37 PM
Hmmm, I'm in the process of cleaning up my comments and trackbacks on way.nu (served by WordPress, which is somewhat better at dealing with comment spam that MoveableType) and doing it as a multipart tutorial:
http://way.nu/archives/2005/06/killing-comment-spam/
BUT it is an onerous process and the average blogger doesn't have the time and talent to fix this stuff, allowing the blogosphere be be littered with garbage.
BUT turning off trackbacks isn't the solution - without cross-conversational linking, you aren't bloggging. Without comments, pingback and trackback all cross-conversational links must be manually created, which puts us back into email link-whoring - how 1990s.
Blog tool vendors have not done a good job of getting their heads together and coming up with a solution that is open and works for everyone - too many egos involved. Typekey was a start, but six apart never really moved it forward or made it easy to use. In a way, this really is Google's problem to solve - all of the comment/trackback/pingback spam is an attempt to game google's results. If they were to launch a blogger connected blogging whitelist/blacklist system it would be the defacto standard instantly.
Posted by: Jonathan Peterson | June 6, 2005 11:25 AM
Jonathan, I turned trackbacks off reluctantly for the reasons you say, but they simply are not adding to cross-conversation at this point, at least for my blog. I don't have the time to extirpate TB spam manually. MT-blacklist works well enough on comment spam that I'm not tempted to turn off comments, which would pain me greatly.
How could Google build and maintain its whitelist/blacklist without it in turn being gamed?
Posted by: David Weinberger | June 6, 2005 11:34 AM
Oh, I understand completely WHY you're turning it off. Several of the WordPress content spam plug-ins also address trackback/pingback spam, and you might find some simple solutions that would fix your own MT problem (renaming the trackback cgi, closing trackbacks on older posts, etc.) BUT you are a high value target for spam because of your googlejuice - the bad guys will always win if their technical chops are equal to yours because you have other things you'd prefer to be doing and they are getting paid for spamming.
As for the how of a Google trackback / pingback / comments solution - they have a bezillion dollars, lots of bright engineers and blogger. I posted some more thoughts on how I'd attack it at Way.Nu
Posted by: Jonathan Peterson | June 6, 2005 09:36 PM