In reflection, when I wrote this, I did gloss over the problems with trackback that you detailed, I agree totally that the problem surpasses the skills and patience of average bloggers who do not have time to implement the stop gap measures of plugins, registration keys, captchas, etc. So I really do not blame anyone for getting frustrated with unwanted crap on their sites thrust there or getting their bandwidth chewed up by spambot attacks.. I would yank it to if it became severe.

And I am waiting for Stephen Downes to pipe in that trackback should be the other way around (pull not push), blog entries should go out and find places where their site is referenced… I can buy that, but where is this implemented? How? It’s just not there, or I have missed it.

I may be very naive, but attempts to plug the spam holes in blog software is a short term and wrong approach, and they key to cut out this stuff is utterly simple– take away their incentive.

Spammers do this to up their PageRank, so if their efforts produced the opposite effect.. poof, they go away. We all ought to be pestering Google to put their great clever weight behind the code that would punish, banish, sites that have large numbers of links generated by spam bots (there MUST be a detectable pattern) — if there was a server or total drop in Google PageRank for sites that are linked via these suprious means, it would stop almost over night. Spammers would be out on the street asking for spare change.

In my dreams.

But I think you dismiss the problems with trackback (and the related comment spam) too easily, which suprises me given how much trouble I know they’ve caused you. I have had to shut down both comments and trackbacks on my site. I was actually forced to do so by my ISP because the spammers were bringing the server to its knees on a regular basis, and the ISP was going to turf me from the server. I know there are technological fixes that can help – I am still running MT, not WordPress (though I am more and more swayed that changing would help some of this), but I know I could use user registration, capthcas, mt blacklist, and others, and this would help some (at least on the comment spam). Mostly it’s a time problem; I’m barely having enough time to write anything in the blog, and have zero time to upgrade software and do more modifications. There’s a separate rant here about the expectations put on users of blog software by the software makers; it’s still too much like ‘hobbyist’ software right now because the core companies are in my mind taking a pretty relaxed attitude towards these problems – why can’t I download one unspammable instance of MT (or whatever else) instead of this plugin, that one, yada yada.

But that presumes there is a solution – with trackback, where the fact that the originator of the trackback is often unknown to the recieving server is one of the prime attractions, this seems to open up the hole that the spammers have been driving through, and security through obscurity is not a good option here. I’d throw this right back at you – the fact that you have this working on your machine and some others still do is not in itself a good argument that it is working in general. In a world where there is no such thing as the single blogging platform, the solution will have to be more general than solving it on one platform, for as more and more people abandon it, it’s value will plummet. I expect we are not in fact opposed here, you seem to be arguing for continued efforts to fix it rather than just throwing up our hands, but the issue of how to allow for other users or sites to create content on our own sites (which is what trackback is doing now, as are comments) without requiring a high barrier to entry or a pre-arranged relationship (accounts, IP registration…) has not been solved in a general way, and until it is, it will just be a constant battle of workarounds and spammer hacks. So yes, let’s not sound the death knoll on something that we’ve all seen can be amazing for creating serendipitous links and relationships, but let’s also not denying that the current way is not working and is hobbling towards its grave.