January 06, 2005
Goodbye Trackback, I barely knew thee
Apparently some spammer finally invested the the five minutes necessary to produce a script capable of flooding this site with abusive trackback pings. Unless I discover a quick hack to make trackbacks approval-only in Movable Type, trackbacks are so off.
Now this is just the latest symptom of an issue I've been wondering about for some time. When weblogging became the hip thing to do some years ago, we already had newsgroups, forums and guestbooks burried under truckloads of spam for viagra and animal porn. Even the worst web programming tutorials began with a two page indoctrination about how you should always assume that every user could be satan himself. And yet the way comments and trackbacks have been implemented up to the present day is just crying for abuse. "Not having learned from past mistakes" doesn't come close to what has happened here.
Looking at the options I have for combatting comment and trackback spam, fellow webloggers recommend using a blacklist, renaming your scripts and looking for nasty words. Now place yourself in the position of a spammer and read the last sentence again. While I do appreciate these efforts, really, how cute is this?
I assume that most of you have some sort of life going on that is unrelated to weblogging. I don't have time to check my site every hour because my spam fighting technique is merely doing damage control.
Comments
Regarding the last paragraph, I understand the sentiment here, but the damage control is necessary to attempt to keep the readership happy.
Regardless of your spam control methods, certain damage protection methods should be in place since, as you say, you can't be there to monitor yor site all the time. But at least you're sleeping a little more soundly at night not worrying about it so much.
Posted by James Booker (#)
I don't consider trackback SPAM *that* harmful - maybe that's because I'm not using MT. Have a look at www.b2evolution.net - it features a centralized blacklist that works pretty well, actually.
Posted by Frank Koehntopp (#)
