Trackback spammers try their luck
Over the last couple of days this site has had something in the region of 200 trackback spams proclaiming the wonders of online gambling. It's actually quite a refreshing change to have some spam again after 10 weeks of being spam free.
After doing a little research, it appears there is no reliable way to block trackback spam whilst allowing legitimate trackbacks, but given their relative unimportance turning off trackbacks for all previous entries appears to be a no-brainer. Clearly the mere fact that someone else is linking to this site is the important point, the trackback's main purpose (* see below) seems to be providing an ego-boosting acknowledgment of that link.
* The argument that trackback serves as a sort of 'continuing the discussion elsewhere' signpost could conceivably be an argument to keep trackback, were it not for the fact that the vast majority of trackbacks are the blogosphere's equivalent of UseNet "me too" posts.
Update: Phil Ringnalda wrote an insightful article on this subject.
Related entries
Spamadelic - 8 October 2004Installing MT-Captcha (aka SCode) - 14 November 2004
Another Movable Type Captcha - 17 November 2004
MT-Captcha report card - 12 December 2004
Installing MT-Blacklist - 14 November 2004
Bayesian filtering on Movable Type - 14 November 2004
One angry young man - 14 July 2005
MT SpamLookup - 21 June 2005
The solution to Blog spamming? - 19 December 2004
Comments
by: Phil Ringnalda at May 16, 2005 5:55 AM
Thanks for dropping by Phil 
Sounds like just what I want, however a brief glance at the MT config page sheds no light on how to check the sender's page for the RDF before automatically refusing the ping. I already have autodiscovery on (but I also have "allow trackback pings off by default" checked). So I don't know what I'm doing wrong 
Unlike you I am no more than a dabbler in MT!
by: thoughton at May 16, 2005 10:46 AM
Sponsors
Pretty funny, for some value of funny, that I automatically refused your Trackback ping as being from a dirty spammer, because you don't have the RDF for Trackback autodiscovery in this page (it's a rough and cheap way of telling spam pings from ham, with a rather high number of false positives, but it also keeps me utterly ping-spam-free, which is rather nice).