Funferal

More spam trackbacks

So I wake up this morning, and check my mail. And there’s a lot of it. And then I realise that almost all of it is junk. Except not just spam – which I just filter to my junkmail folder and delete – but trackback spam on the weblog. And because there isn’t a simple interface for deleting trackacks I’m going to be spending a fair portion of the day deleting the 333 trackbacks that arrived. Yes, that’s right – 333. I hate spammers.
The annoying thing is that trackback has sometimes been useful in the past for learning about where someone has linked to one of my posts, though that’s only an occasional thing. And also, for some reason outbound trackbacks from my site generally fail (I’m not sure what the problem is there since it used to work). Maybe I should remove trackbacks, though I’d hate to have to do that….
Update: It appears I was wrong. I may have received notification of 333 pings, but the actual number was far higher – some notifications just didn’t get emailed to me. I’m guessing something around 1,000, perhaps more.
Also, I’ve now implemented the MovableType ‘nofollow’ plugin, so spammers will gain no benefit from spamming this site. All links in comments and pings will have the rel=”nofollow” attribute. As a result, I’m reopening comments, at least temporarily on new posts. If all goes well I may reopen comments on all posts.