I woke up yesterday morning to over three hundred trackback spams. These are a real pain in the ass, because when they come in a flood like that from a single spammer (in this case it was pr0n), it's hard to search through them to find the random ones from others, which needs to be done to clean them all out.

Joe Katzman has been having similar problems, on a much larger scale. I've been thinking about shutting down trackback as well, but before I do, I think I'll try this idea, via Annoying Old Guy in Joe's comments section.

It looks interesting, and if everyone did it, it would make life much more difficult for these supreme scum of the earth. As I type these words I just got two series of half a dozen or so from mortgage lenders. Who knows how many they would have hit me with if I hadn't been at the computer and could cut them off at the pass? I just wish I could cut them off at the nuts.

I run a teeny-tiny little website for an astronomy club; I get maybe one hundred valid web views per day.

Unfortunately, I also get four or five thousand referrer spams per day. And those are the ones that get through the various DENY clauses in my web server configuration.

I've pretty much banned northern europe from my site, simply because I've never gotten a single hit from there that wasn't a link back to porn, gambling or drugs.

Oh - if you can use it, try "Bad Behaviour" it's software that interfaces with wordpress and other tools to filter out trackback spam. I don't know if ti works with MT, though.

I think I'll try this idea

Looks intriguing. ExpressionEngine uses blacklisting, but I have to say I like the slowdown concept as an additional counter-strategy.

I wish I knew how I could implement something like that on my non-MT site.

Posted by at July 13, 2006 11:21 AM

Oops, sorry. That was me.

Trackback is only really useful for raising your pagerank. If you really want to know who is linking your blog, use the referer header.