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.
I don’t know if MovableType supports integration with SURBLs (Spam URI Realtime Blocklists), but you might take a look for those.
Before we migrated to drupal, I installed this
http://www.kerneltrap.org/jeremy/drupal/spam/
It seems to work great — or perhaps I should say, so far so good 😉