i loaded akismet (an anti-spam and spam-trackback for wordpress) software onto my blog two weeks ago today, and my pain with spam trackbacks has almost ceased. i’ve had to tag a handful that slipped through, but akismet has caught over 5500 spam and spam trackbacks in those two weeks, and not one of them was a real comment that shouldn’t have been caught. so i’ve turned back on the ‘show trackbacks and pingbacks’ feature on my blog, and removed the ‘commenter must have a previously approved comment’ hurdle.