Good start to the day (not)
I woke up my computer from its blissful slumbering state, and staggered into the kitchen to assemble breakfast (to call it "cooking" would be a gross exaggeration, and you know I never exaggerate). A few seconds later, I heard the "mail received" chime start, um, chiming...and it didn't stop for two minutes. I knew, without looking, what it meant: trackback spam*, and lots of it.
390 pings, to be exact. And, as usual, it was all pøker-related. Fortunately, a few mouse clicks added the offending URLs to the MT-Blacklist, deleted the links and rebuilt the database.
Happy Friday!
*For those of you fortunate enough to have avoided this apparently incurable malady called "blogging," trackbacks are generated when someone links to a blog post, and sends a "ping" (not to be confused with a golf club) -- an electronic notice of the link -- to that post, where it shows up as a link back to the site that linked to said post. Confused? Me too. Anyway, trackback spammers utilize that linking function in an apparent attempt to (1) draw unsuspecting visitors to their own tawdry websites, and (2) take advantage of Google's ranking algorithm that weights incoming links in determing search result placement (although there's some debate about whether or to what extent that's still being done). Trackback spammers use computer programs to send out massive volumes of pings to blogs, just as email spammers automatically generated the garbage that ends up in your mailbox. We hates 'em, we do. However, I use the aforementioned MT-Blacklist plugin to completely erase those trackbacks, and add them to a list of banned URLs so that they cannot repeat this ugly behavior. Unfortunately, the spammers seem to have a limitless budget for registering creative new URLs (such as www.scooby-do-dah-poker-day.com, etc.) The battle rages!
The Thinklings have just for the first time, in the last two weeks or so, started getting trackback spam. (It's mostly of the pharmaceutical variety.) We'd never gotten any before, but now I'm deleting about 20 or so a day. That's not much compared to what you and others are getting, but it's still a pain.
I wondered for a while why we just now started getting trackback spam, but then I realized it's because our trackbacks weren't working for a long time! A fortunate side effect of an otherwise inconvenient system defect.
Rachel, I could write a whole series of books about the things I don't know. Join the club!
Jared, are you trying to tell me that sometimes, if it is broke, don't fix it? ;-)
Posted by: Eric at March 19, 2005 01:45 PMEric, I renamed the trackback script (mt-tb.cgi) to something unusual (and made the corresponding change in mt.cfg). That has stopped the stupider trackback spambots and most of the trackback spam. A few bots are smart enough to parse individual entries for the new trackback script name, but you can mess with them by changing the standard text that surrounds the trackback URI.
Posted by: Michael Bates at March 23, 2005 08:20 AMMichael, thanks for the tip! I had previously read this advice somewhere else, but didn't know anyone who'd done it. Based on your feedback, I've made the change...it'll be interesting to see if it works as advertised.
Posted by: Eric at March 23, 2005 11:13 AMAbout the publisher
Random Abbye photos...
Reason #21 to wear shoes in West Texas
From my rooftop, I can see my own mortality
The USPS: We're now 27% more efficient at mangling your mail!
My Favorite Yard Work
Review: The Amazon Kindle
Personal Library Exploration Continues
Tech Support That's Out of This World
Flower and Butterfly
The Season's First Roundup
Recording History
Want a Healthier Mind? Fuggedaboutit!
Redefining a Bust
Thank you...
Farewell to Abbye
The Neighborhood:
West Texas Blogs:
[Midland unless otherwise indicated]
Other Texas Blogs:
The Business:
The Church:
The World:
I had a few of those but I didn't know what it was til now :) Shows I still don't know everything hehe.
Posted by: Rachel at March 18, 2005 04:43 PM