OddThinking

I’ve been losing a few skirmishes against Trackback spam recently. More than a few, I guess; they are hammering the site.

If you are reading the posts directly with a web-browser, you haven’t noticed. I have cleaned up the spam trackbacks reasonably quickly. Even when they haven’t yet been cleaned up, Trackbacks (including Pingbacks) get much less prominence these days on this blog than they used to.

If you are reading the comments feed via a personal feed reader, you probably haven’t noticed. The spams gets cleaned up reasonably quickly – hopefully most are gone before you get around to reading it.

If you are reading the comments through an email feed or via an feed aggregator, you are probably noticing. Sorry. The elephant interferers are apparently smart enough to add links to my blog long enough to trick Spam Karma 2, but then clean away the links later.

If we are lucky, the blacklists will catch-up with these guys and the problem will sink below the surface again for a while. If we aren’t, the problem will get worse and I will turn off Trackbacks. This would be disappointing, because I really like it when I find out someone linked to me!

To me, it re-emphasizes the need for a few plugins and WordPress settings I have wanted for a while but not enough to write them for myself.

• “>Tombstones or their equivalent to soften the impact on Bloglines/Google Reader readers.
• Manual pre-approval for Trackbacks, while comments remain instantly moderated by Spam Karma.
• A more nuanced algorithm for “NoFollow”.
• Support for Refbacks.