The Death of Trackback

Tom Coates thinks that Trackback is dead.

I think it's time we faced the fact that Trackback is dead. We should state up front - the aspirations behind Trackback were admirable. We should reassert that we understand that there is a very real need to find mechanisms to knit together the world of webloggers and to allow conversations across multiple weblogs to operate effectively. We must recognise that Trackback was one of the first and most important attempts to work in that area. But Nevertheless, we have to face the fact - Trackback is dead.
It has been killed by spam and by spammers - by the sheer horror of ping after ping pushing incest and bestiality links. It has been killed by the exploitation of human beings quite prepared to desecrate the work of tens of thousands of people in order that they should scrabble together a few coins. It has been killed by the experience of an inbox overwhelmed by the automated rape of our creative endeavours.

Trackback has been disabled on this site for several months. A spammer actually broke it, by posting so much trackback spam in one go that the site exceeded it's disk quota and corrupted the database. I have since had little indication to fix it, and trackback will not be coming back in the forseeable future. It's just not worth the hassle any more. Thanks to spammers, the cost to me in time and aggravation of supporting trackbacks is far more than their utility.

Comments are still hanging in there, just. I have considered getting rid of comments as well, since I got very few legitimate comments and rather too much spam. But recently I've had a couple of posts recently that have generated a significant (for me) number of comments, and for the moment, comments are still worth having.

For now.

Posted by TimHall at April 28, 2005 07:54 PM | TrackBack

Comments

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.

Posted by: Ginger Stampley on April 28, 2005 09:31 PM

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.

Posted by: Tim Hall on April 28, 2005 11:08 PM

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.

Posted by: Richard@Home on April 29, 2005 04:36 PM

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.

Posted by: NRT on April 29, 2005 04:53 PM


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