Trackback woes

scott, on October 7th, 2005 at 11:11 am Said:

It’s ironic that as I read this my own blog app is so crippled as to be non-responsive by yet another barrage of spam comments. The web is always a little bit broken, as you have observed, David. Maybe we could design a web where spam is impossible (or at least unlikely). But would that necessarily involve giving up the freewheeling, open nature of the web in the process?

Harold Jarche, on October 7th, 2005 at 12:07 pm Said:

I’m not that popular either and I have been getting at least one trackback spam ping every minute for the past three months. Obviously, trackbacks have been turned off. I use Drupal.

adamg, on October 7th, 2005 at 2:32 pm Said:

I’d been getting one a second on my Drupal installation. Darn right I turned trackback off. Now I’m forced to rely on Technorati for my ego quota :-).

Arnold, on October 7th, 2005 at 4:40 pm Said:

I never thought Trackback was that great. Rarely do I really care how many hundreds of blogs are linking to a site that I am already reading. The trackback usually only says “XYZ said this, here’s a link.”, instead of “continuing the conversation”, as Trackback was supposed to do.

But what do I know. I don’t even have comments turned on on my blog.

scott, on October 8th, 2005 at 1:01 pm Said:

I love trackback and I am in no hurry to disable it. When I read something so interesting on someone else’s blog that a brief comment to their post will just not do, I naturally want to write at length about it on my own blog so that my readers (such as I have) can see. I think it both a matter of continuity and good manners to use trackback to a) allow the readers of the first blog to see what response I have written on my own, and b) to “credit” the author of the first blog for bringing up the issue.

It would be frustrating if I had to write all responses to others’ blog entries within their own comments. It already bothers me that some of my best writing and thinking ends up on someone else’s site instead of my own!

blau, on October 8th, 2005 at 3:34 pm Said:

I use Bad Behaviour on a couple of sites I manage and it is quite effective stopping trackback and spam comment attempts.

It is a set of php scripts for WordPress, drupal and other platforms. Open source. http://www.ioerror.us/software/bad-behavior/

Linda, on October 10th, 2005 at 1:41 pm Said:

I have a guest book that is spammed every day. Thought I’d take advantage a little bit and put a plea out there for anyone who can help me fix it.

I’ll pay.

Seems there should be a script that will prevent urls from being entered in the guest book text box. That would help a lot because most of the spam is screensful of viagra and gambling links.

Or, if not a script, a new guest book.

If anyone can help, please leave a note here!

Thank you.

Branko Collin, on October 10th, 2005 at 4:16 pm Said:

Linda, is your guestbook home-grown, or generic? If the latter, which software is running it?

David, I have not had to misfortune yet to need Bad Behaviour, but a friend runs it on all three of her blogs and seems very happy with it.

By the way, is it legal to take retaliatory measures in the US? Here in the Netherlands that can get you four years in prison (spammers, on the other hand, get a fine of max. .25M Euro). I could imagine a system though that will ping back all track backs a hundred times. Hardly painful for an honest tracker-backer, but a spammer gets hit hard.

Linda, on October 11th, 2005 at 9:37 pm Said:

Branko

Gee, now I have to admit in front of God and everyone that it is a FrontPage generated guest book. Okay, but I know it is not hopeless. You can add any script to FP and it will work!

But, also that’s why I say, if someone can help with a complete new guest book, I’m certainly open to it, and will pay for it.

Since it’s FP, you can guess: it’s Windows 2000 on a Microsoft-IIS/5.0 server.

If it came down to it, I think we could change servers, but I’d rather not.

If you aren’t a Windows guy, if you can ask around, I would really appreciate it.

Branko Collin, on October 12th, 2005 at 4:54 pm Said:

I did some VBScript work this year, but I am afraid did not learn enough to be able to help. It would seem there should be a regular expression method in ASP which you could use to strip out hyperlinks, though I am not sure that would help against spambots. The bots may not check if hyperlinks are accepted and still happily post nonsense.

Better would be to block messages that contain hyperlinks. (On my blog, any message that contains more than one hyperlink goes to the moderation bucket.)

As for folks that can build things for you, there’s no-one I can think of right now, but you could try advertising at sites like http://www.freelancers.net.

Linda, on October 12th, 2005 at 11:39 pm Said:

Thanks very much, Branko. I’ll take a look at freelancers.net. Yes, blocking hyperlinks would do it, I think. At least it would get rid of most of it (almost all of it), and make it manageable.

Having posts with urls go to a moderation bucket sounds great! We would just change the name of “moderation bucket” to “trash.” :)

I have a tell-a-friend on the same site made in VBScript on ASP and it’s great. I tried to contact the person who made it but never heard back. It had been years since he made it for me, and I lost track of him. Moral: Always keep up your networking!