Via David Tiley we have an interview with one the scumbags who comment spam blogs. One of them just finally left my blog alone after trying to leave about a hundred trackback spams. I deleted the first few that arrived, and found that it was posting new ones as fast as I deleted them. I renamed my trackback flavour so that it wasn't called "trackback" anymore and that stopped the spams from getting through.
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It was so bad that hostmatters(who provides space for tons of blogs) was down this morning. I had to delete my trackback file as well.
I think even you'd agree that spammers should be shot. With a gun. And that Lott could then write about how guns are effective against spam. And you could say they're not and . . .
noticed in the link "foadspammer"
Heh.
The bastards are going to destroy trackback. The only solution is that you check that there is a link to your blog before you accept the trackback, but I think most people will just turn it off.
SayUncle --
I'm afraid Lott will have to find something else to do, since Kieran Healy already solved the problem of spam.
I hate to say this, but so what? Trackback is a silly protocol anyway, and the major web logging programs implement it in a completely incompetent way (witness the number of repreated trackbacks you see on typical "Movable Type" web logs -- the idiots at Six Apart don't even hash the parameters they're passed and drop duplicates...).
Unfortunately the right way to do the "which blogs link to me?" thing is with a robot which crawls the web -- Technorati, or, better, something with a decent data center behind it like Google. An edge-triggered approach is just wrong.