Comments on: The Death of Trackback

By: NRT

NRT — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:53:44 +0000

I don’t (currently) have problems keeping Trackbacks open for two months, as I do with comments. I do have a fairly aggressive blacklist filter, though, mainly based on generic offensive keywords rather than spammers’ domains.

Trackback’s not dead, it’s just growing up a little – there’s less room for childish innocence nowadays.

By: Richard@Home

Richard@Home — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:36:34 +0000

I outlined a method for dealing with trackback spam on my blog a few months ago: http://richardathome.no-ip.com/index.php?article_id=415 I'm happy to report that since that article was written, I haven't had a single piece of trackback spam get through to my live pages. The only tweaks I've made are to add a few hardcoded search engines to cut down on the clutter a bit.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:08:56 +0000

The think about trackback spam is that each trackback attack seemed to consist of hundreds of trackbacks over a very short period. Comment spam seemed to come in smaller numbers.

By: Ginger Stampley

Ginger Stampley — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 21:31:29 +0000

What we finally did was put a script on the server that kills all the TB perl processes if there are more than 9. Given the number of blogs we host, that’s not unreasonable as an upper bound.

Of course, since we’re a small server (we host our own MT site on a Mac G3 350 under my husband’s desk), trackback attacks were effectively DOSing us off the net.