At least until I get home and have some time to go in and do a script rename, I've had to disable trackback. I'd gotten several hundred of them over the last couple days, and don't have reliable enough connectivity to stay on top of them.

We have to come up with a general solution to comment and trackback spam. The blogosphere thrives on feedback and crosstalk, and will lose much of its value if we can't allow this due to vandals.

You mean some people actually look at trackbacks?

I can't say I ever intentionally have.

Rand,

One thing you could try is requiring two-step posting, where you have to do a preview before you can actually post a comment.

All you can realistically do is make it harder. One example would be to add a cookie to your visitor's browser - the cookie would be set (containing a timestmap) when they visited the home page, and then cryptographically signed (with a timestamp) when they visit the "add" page. When they submit the form, you can check the signatures and timestamps to make sure that they visited all the previous pages.

Of course, that is probably just silly - and could be easily bypassed by simulating a browser. But it would probably raise the bar far enough that the spam would go elsewhere, at least for a while.

Of course, a simple answer might be to just check the referring url in your update script...

HI Rand. My acquaintance Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer has just posted "Katie Couric is a Bonehead" on his site, for her ridiculous criticism of the NASA budget. Check it out.

I dunno, Rand, I never ever learned how ping or trackback worked, and I'm perfectly happy with my blogging.

One thing we can do is to shift the responsibility to Google, where it becomes a part of their endless fight with SEO scammers. Go into Google Blogs, enter "transterrestrial", receive the list of all recent links.

Technorati is supposed to do the same, but their internal mechanism relies on ping, which is completely broken as you noticed. So they are not real help.

*cough* kaptcha *cough*

John, you apparently have no idea what blog pings and trackbacks are. They are performed by software without human interaction. How would you use kaptcha there? I think you confused our problem with comment spam.

For American politicians and military personnel, playing dumb and talking about numbers of bodies in morgues and official statistics, etc, seems to be the latest tactic. But as any Iraqi knows, not every death is being reported... So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this [600,000] number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.

The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?

We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?

There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.

Let's pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al.

In other words, "AnonIraq", you have no idea how many people have died in Iraq. Please attach your comments to a story that is on-topic.

Maybe we should be congratulating you, AnonIraq. It's your
people that have been doing the killing. The ones that you
legitimize. This was their goal from the beginning.

Congratulations AnonIraq. Hope you're so proud.

Hey guys,

Forgive me for starting an off-topic discussion here, but I'd like to hear what you think.

My personal theory about Bush's Tet remarks: I don't think Bush actually understood the question. If you listen to his response, it seems pretty vague. I think he might not have known/understood what the Tet Offensive was.

Am I nuts? Am I reading his comments incorrectly? (I haven't seen video of them yet.)

We have to come up with a general solution to comment and trackback spam.

My solution to trackback spam was to chuck the whole idea. But that was mainly because I was getting maybe two legitimate trackbacks in a ... well, a really good month. But I was getting obviously illegitimate trackbacks about every week or so.

I don't get comment spam, and that's because of the tools at my disposal as an ExpressionEngine user. What I have been getting more of lately, though, is registration spam -- people trying to sign up as members of my site so their spam links will show up on my member list. I've firewalled the registration form (legitimate registrants now have to e-mail me for the link) and that probably still won't work because the URL is fairly predictable.

I guess the next wave is brainless off-topic commenting, as from AnonIraq and AtG.

It's a Tet Offensive of BDS commenters!