It was bound to happen sooner or later - after comment spam, there's now also trackback spam. With MT-BlackList's help, I just deleted about 60 spam trackbacks in a minute.
As an extra precaution on top of MT-BlackList, I had already started closing comments-threads after a couple of months. I guess I'll have to turn off the trackbacks as well.
While I don't really have a better idea, I'd hate to see it come to that: an old abandoned and forgotten post, explaining how to foo with Bar v.0.9, which has long since settled into the top spot in Google for "foo Bar," is the perfect target for a TrackBack from a post explaining how to do it with v.2.8.
(I also hate to think about how little time it would take either one of us to write the code for a spambot to navigate from an old post with closed comments up to newer posts with open comments. In Perl or Python, I think I'd start by grabbing off-the-shelf classes for RSS autodiscovery and RSS parsing, and just use your feed's comments element against you. Unless you only keep the number of posts you don't mind having spammed open at any one time, you won't have gained anything, only denied yourself comments from people who've newly discovered an old post.)
Posted by Phil Ringnalda at July 2, 2004 11:43 PMJust wrote about this this morning. See Trackback spamming.
Posted by Jay Allen at July 3, 2004 4:22 AM