CogDogBlog

It’s only been… what, a few days?… when I insinuated that Trackback was not such a major problem. I just took a look at one of our MovableType 2.66 sites (that will remain nameless, linkless from here) that I’ve not scanned in a while, and saw a whole raft of Trackback spam sitting in the bins. Sigh.

It took about 30 minutes of adding new filters to the MT Blacklist, running the Despam routine. I deleted somewhere between 150 and 200 ping spams. The interesting thing was among the usual suspects (pills and porn) was a majority of links to various Mp3 sites– what’s with that?

Other preventative measures included:
* renaming the Trackback script and adjusting the MT config files. This necessitates rebuilding all pages of all blogs running off of the site
* deleting the option of Trackback email notification. Since there have been no legit trackbacks in a year, why bother emailing spam notes?
* turning off the “allow_tb_pings” flag in the database for old entries.

It’s a lesser used site, and the infestation is pretty minor compared to other’s sites.

To re-iterate, maybe re-state: I like the notion of the service Trackback provides but the implementation is faulty, yet nothing exists to fill in the space. So what are we to do?

Hello, Google- remove the PageRank incentive for spam placed links- spank the Pills Porn Casion link spammers down to the basement.

This entry was posted 2 years, 11 months ago and is filed under using mt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.