Are Trackbacks (still) Worth It?
Blog Herald has an interesting post, "Have Trackbacks Become Too Spammy To Be Worthwhile?"
You may have also discovered a surge in trackback spam recently as autoblogging software is being used by more and more spammers to reach out and cull RSS feeds. This phenomenon has led to many disabling trackbacks, or raising the “blacklist” level so high that you might never see some trackbacks again.
I am personally on the fence on this one. Trackbacks have a ton of potential to connect content, users, and blogs but over the last 12 months or so I find them becoming much less useful and the valid trackback to spam ratio has been increasing at a very fast rate.
Initially, we were not going to support trackbacks in Graffiti because of decreased usefulness. However, since they are such a popular feature, we have put them on the beta 2 feature list. (note: They will be implemented as a plugin, so they can be easily disabled or enabled.)
I am starting to wonder if we should just scrap the idea. What do you think? Are trackbacks still worth the effort?
Comments
Tony Hung on on 11.24.2007 at 8:44 PM
I, for one, am firmly in the "still worth the effort" camp.
But then again, you probably already knew that. ;)
Thanks for reading the blogherald!
Cheers
t @ tbh
Dave Burke on on 11.25.2007 at 12:38 PM
Scott, I agree, trackback spam is becoming very annoying, but trackbacks are still work the effort to connect content, users and blogs exactly as you said.
I've been banning the IP addresses in CS, but since the spammer originating IPs are so numerous this is only reasonably effective, plus its a bit of a pain to pull the IPaddress from cs_posts, then delete the trackback in the CP. I was thinking of a mod to automate this a bit more actually. A prominent term in the spambacks I'm getting is the bulleted » unicode in the subject, which I've added as a forbidden word in the CS Spam Blocker (just today, in fact), but with the semicolon and ampersand I'm not sure it will work.
Sorry for the long comment and diversion into trackback blocking, but your post was great timing with my recent frustrations with trackback spam. My vote is "still worth the effort." Thanks!
paul on on 11.25.2007 at 12:55 PM
We need trackbacks and we need Google to help us fight sploger-spam.
Splogers are essentially Google Partners, but Google doesn't make it easy for us to report them.
Andrew Tobin on on 11.25.2007 at 1:29 PM
To some degree they are useful for you to find sites that reference you that you'd otherwise never hear of - so it's always been a bit useful... more and more I'm seeing people just referring back to Technorati, who I'd assume would hopefully have better algorithms to cull the junk out.
Maybe that's another option to add in a plug-in out of the box?
Simone on on 11.26.2007 at 1:05 AM
I disabled trackbacks 2-3 weeks ago after I got hit by 30k spammy trackbacks in less than 2-3 days. And even if I were using Akismet as spam filter it didn't recognize them as being spam.
But I think trackbacks are a good way to connect to other blogs, and track blog conversations.
I should say, from my blogging experience, think about a really good way to prevent spam.
Steve Campbell on on 11.26.2007 at 1:48 PM
Trackbacks have always been worthless, except for those "in-the-know". For the rest of us (including me), they are always annoying spam.
Bertrand Le Roy on on 11.28.2007 at 8:47 PM
Trackbacks should not be published by default, and subject to the exact same filters and rules as comments.
By the way, before you do that in Graffiti, can you please do it in Community Server? I'm very frustrated by the time I spend on my asp.net blog deleting spam trackbacks that get automatically published. Couldn't find any setting to mitigate this.
Cheers!