« After 30 Days Clara Martinez's Feeding Tube is Re-Connected | Main | Moving pictures stop abortion - Young mothers describe how ultrasound technology persuaded them to choose life for their children »

Trackback Spam

Captain Ed and Michelle Malkin have both experienced significant trackback spam leading them to question its value. Coincidentally, earlier today I received over 100 spammer pings that made it past MT-Blacklist and forced me to waste time and effort cleaning up.

Michelle has already buckled under the pressure and Captain Ed is teetering.

I personally believe that the power of the blogosphere is, in part, tied to the subject dependent interconnectivity. Without trackbacks, the network is likely to stagnate and resist desirable change that brings new thoughts and analysis forward.

However, for Movabletype users there appears to be a fairly straightforward way to reduce trackback spam. I implemented it and spent all of five minutes performing the following (easy) steps:

The first is to install DisguiseTrackback - a plug-in that hides the actual trackback url from harvesters. Installation involves placing one file in the MT/plugins directory.

The second step is to rename the mt-tb.cgi to something else and update the mt.cgf file with the new name. This hides the trackback script from spammers

I'll keep you posted about how this works.

Learning MovableType has several additional trackback spam reducing methods.

Posted by tim at April 18, 2005 12:40 AM

Articles Related to Blogging:

Attending the Annual March for Life? - Jan 05, 2007
Calling all Pro-Life Bloggers - Dec 12, 2006
How to Make Money Using Google Ads - Nov 15, 2006
Blogging Interfaces - Oct 13, 2006
Where to Buy your Domain Name - Oct 08, 2006
Blogs4Life Updates - Dec 20, 2005
Chitika eMiniMalls - Oct 27, 2005
GodBlogCon 2005 Tomorrow - Oct 12, 2005
Happy Birthday MovableType - Oct 10, 2005
God Blog Con - Next Month! - Sep 19, 2005

Comments

I wrote a plugin for plog that solves the track back spam in two ways.

1) It can only accept trackbacks when the specified url points at at web page that itself has a trackback url
2) It can only accept trackbacks when it passes the bayesian spam filter that is used for comments.

Posted by: Paul Westbrook at April 19, 2005 1:42 AM