Combatting Trackback Spam
As I’m digging back through blog posts elminating the build up of Trackback spam, I’m thinking way too much about Trackback.
If about 90% of Trackbacks are spam and only about 10% are legitimate, is it worth having Trackback on this weblog?
Having software that manages Trackbacks better would be awesome. I wish Manila handled them similar to the discussion group: that we could go to one screen to view the most recent ones, delete them, etc., etc., as well as having them on individual posts. Just having a select all feature on the Trackback screens would make getting rid of Trackback spam much, much easier. WordPress, the new software on the blog server, offers a list of the most recent Trackbacks. Based on the amount this blog is getting right now, the list will be quickly overwhelmed.
I did find a shortcut. By going to http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/ne… where n=the number of the post, I can manually flip through Trackbacks on the blog instead of navigating to a blog post, clicking the Trackback link, etc., etc.
I can also tell I’ve been spending too much time playing with FileMaker lately. Not only would I love to be able to search Trackbacks to find all of the ones advertising certain medication and delete them at once, I’d love to be able to get a list of the blog contents by number and type. If the list also gave a title or some indication of what the item is, that’d be awesome. One of the problems I anticipate is hitting a pocket of comment spam–some of which are as great as 200 posts. I guess maybe I’m thinking too much like a database administrator. Well, Manila has a database structure …
I did e-mail the weblogmaster to ask if something had changed recently that might allow the spammers in. I haven’t gotten hit with Trackback spam like this before. It has been trickling in all along, but to see months of posts covered in at least 20 comments a round starting a few weeks ago makes me think something has changed.
I hope next time, I remember to skip 4696-4790 because most of that is deleted comment spam.
Addendum: Blocks of comments, most of which are spam: 4125-4160, 4187-4202, 4307-4310, 4317-4332, 4334-4349, 4375-4415, 4417-4435, (post 4436 is about the comment spam attack) 4437-4552, 4554-4572,
(See, one of the, uh, "features" of Manila is that you can’t actually delete comments from the weblog. Deleting a comment makes it disappear from sight, but it’s still on the blog, taking up numbers. I’m noting the blocks of comments so the next time I have to run through the posts on this blog, I know what numbers to skip.)
