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stupid trackbacks

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i’ve tried what i can to eliminate spam trackbacks, but they just keep coming up with new ways to get them through. and i’m sick of policing my blog for spam trackbacks, as many as hundreds a day. so i’ve sadly turned off the trackback and pingback feature. i’ve also temporarily changed my comment moderation so that only previously approved commenters get posted immediately – the rest go into my moderation cue, and once i’ve “approved” them, they’ll get posted. we’re looking into some wordpress plug-ins that will deal with all of this more directly; so hopefully i can reset things to normal soon.

evil spammers!

9 thoughts on “stupid trackbacks”

  3. Are you familair with Blue Frog? It was a neat piece of software (now defunct) which tried to take on email spammers. You installed it and every time a spammer sent you an email, it automatically sent an unsubscribe request. When this was combined across hundreds of thousands of users it overwhelmed the spammers systems – allowing for a legal DDoS response. Eventually the threats caused Blue Frog to shut down, but there are rumors of follow-ups.

  4. I don’t get nearly the traffic you do, but when I came back from vacation I had about 50 spam posts concerning all kinds of things I won’t mention here. It’s funny, in a not-so-funny way, to see the list of words on my censor list for my comments now. If you find a way to fix the problem for good…let me know!

  5. WordPress’ own Akismet will take care of that. I run Akismet on my personal blog and we have it running on another blog that gets literally thousands of hits per day and it does a great job with comment and trackback spam. Cost? Free.

    I think it’ll take care of your problem.

    http://akismet.com/

  8. I use Akismet as the default spam filter for wordpress and it does a great job with comments (missed only 5 out of about 1,464), but it doesn’t seem to catch trackbacks as well. Just yesterday morning I woke up and had to delete 10 new porn trackbacks. Maybe I need to be more intentional about marking those items as “spam” for Akismet to “learn” for the future instead of just deleting them. Hmmm…

  9. i’ve had akismet loaded for 24 hours now, and it’s working GREAT! i haven’t had a single spam or spam trackback get through yet. and it’s pulled out 788 so far, with no errors.

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