j's scratchpad

I’ve been spending some time during the last few days going through old blog posts and cleaning out trackback spam. It’s overwhelming. Some of the posts have close to 200 spam trackbacks on them. Some attacks bring twenty at a time to one post. I keep hoping I’ll find a magic way to select all of the boxes on a trackback screen, but that hasn’t happened yet. For some reason, the Manila developers didn’t provide one. I haven’t found a short cut using the keyboard or a Web browser feature. I even looked at form manager, but apparently, trackback check boxes don’t count as forms. Boo!

Anyway …

I came across David Herron’s legitimate trackback link and found some of his words interesting:

"The lesson is that trackbacks demonstrate one of the common pitfall patterns. Someone sees a problem and invents a solution, but the solution often creates several other problems."

The problem to which David refers is how to let other site administrators know you’re linking to them. The solution commonly in practice is trackback. He explains all of that in his post.

The post he links to is, well, about trackback spam. I considered leaving the 191 spam trackbacks there for your enjoyment, but I didn’t. I realize there isn’t much I can do right now about the spam on this entire weblog. I’m worried about it because a lot of it is just … well, not safe for work and not conducive to the atmosphere I hope to create here. I don’t want my readers who visit this blog while they’re at work to find some of the garbage that’s showing up here in the trackbacks.

Besides a check all button, another handy feature would be the ability to cap the number of trackbacks. I think it’s fairly safe for me to assume I wouldn’t get more than 20 trackbacks on a post. If I could tell Manila not to allow more than 20 trackbacks on any post, that would save me a lot of work.

Another thing I’ve been pondering is whether any companies, especially drug companies, should take an interest in preventing trackback spam. I hadn’t heard of some of the medications showing up as spam until I was deleting the link, so, on the one hand, it works as marketing. On the other hand, I’d hesitate to purchase many of them because of how I now associate them with spam. I like to think that most major drug companies have no connection to the spammers–and I’m pretty sure they don’t–but now the negative association is there.

I should also mention the best trackback spam link ever. Don’t worry: it’s totally safe for work. It’s something my penpal will love.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 10:02 am and is filed under About this Weblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.