The Finch Formerly Known As Gold

17 December 2006

Time to backtrack?

I was deleting yet another piece of trackback spam last night, and I wondered, briefly, if it was even worth it to keep the darn things running.

In a couple of minutes I found this commentary from Kasia:

[I]s trackback effectively dead? Gone the way of the dodo and frames? I suppose it's time to kill it completely (at least on this blog) say a few words of gratitude for its usefulness for as long as it has lasted and thank spammers for making yet another communication tool effectively useless.

A comment from one of her readers:

Trackbacks were dead the day a spammer first heard about them, which was the day after they were first announced. It was such a ludicrously stupid idea from the start and I'm surprised it took this long for people to realize it was going to be nothing but a spam magnet, much like unmoderated posting.

This was ten months ago; it is probably prudent to assume things have not improved since then.

At any rate, only 7.2 percent of my TBs (46 of 642) since the database flush in September have turned out to be valid; the rest were junk. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone is doing better — or, God forbid, worse.

Posted at 11:31 AM to Blogorrhea , Scams and Spams


I use WordPress and the Akismet spam plugin, so never see trackback or comment spam. In the last 6 months, maybe 4 have snuck through.

I don't get a lot of trackbacks, but the few I do get are a real lift.

Posted by: Terry at 12:13 PM on 17 December 2006

I run two WordPress blogs apart from this; they get very little traffic, and Spam Karma 2 has been installed on them.

So long as the spam is actually kept off the site, I can deal with the junk, but it's still disheartening.

Posted by: CGHill at 12:43 PM on 17 December 2006

I'm running WP and Askimet, too, and have only seen a couple of TBs sneak through. The worst offenders remain spam commenters, but Askimet keeps most of them off, too.

I had to ditch Spam Karma because it was overwhelming my database. Askimet dumps them after X number of days, while SK keeps them around indefinitely.

On another note, the death of trackbacks also kills linking incentives for newer bloggers, who've traditionally used that method to inform "bigger" blogs of their existence.

Posted by: Venomous Kate at 3:55 PM on 17 December 2006

SK2 now has a toggle for auto-delete of old spams after X number of days, although you do have to set it manually the first time.

After looking at these numbers and feeling despondent, I checked out the comments here, and almost 75 percent of them are legit.

Posted by: CGHill at 5:13 PM on 17 December 2006

Comment spam -- I used to remember what that was.

Since I restored trackback on YKY, I've had no spam TBs (knock on wood). Whoever was hitting me with those nonsense TBs seems to have moved on. I did get one TB on a recent post from someone else updating a three-week-old post with nothing but a link to me -- I deleted that and updated my trackback policy, but it's the only bad TB I've had lately.

As you'll no doubt recall from my previous comments on the topic, EE has a very effective native anti-spam setup for TBs, which only said nonsense spammer was able to defeat to no gain for himself. In addition, I have an extension installed that closes trackbacks on posts more than three days old.

The only thing left for the spammers to do on my site anymore is spamming my member list, and I've taken measures that I hope will put a stop to it.

Posted by: McGehee at 10:17 AM on 18 December 2006