Over 90% of trackbacks were spam

I haven't been monitoring my trackbacks for a while, and when I checked them this morning I found a ton of spam. After I was finished deleting around 700 trackbacks (not by hand, I ran queries with spam words).

I found that over 90% of all the trackbacks that I've had on my blog are spam. That figure was a little higher than I expected. Keep in mind that I wasn't doing much to filter them out. I generally like the idea of trackbacks, so I'm not going to disable them. Would you stop using email just because you get a lot of spam? No you get a better filter.

So that's just what I did, and thankfully Ray Camden just posted a list of trackback spam words that I was able to easily use in my own blog software. Thanks Ray!.

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Over 90% of trackbacks were spam was first published on March 02, 2006.

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Comments

Ok, thanks Ray!

by Pete Freitag on 03/02/2006 at 4:25:01 AM UTC

I just had to disable trackbacks on my blog. I worked up a non image captcha type deal for comments but trackbacks just weren't important enough at the time.

by john Wilker on 03/02/2006 at 11:47:06 AM UTC

What is trackbacks? All I know about trackbacks is that nowaday most of the blogs have the Trackback url at the bottom of every entry. What does it do? What is the benefit of it?

by Johnny on 03/06/2006 at 7:35:09 AM UTC

Trackbacks are an automatic way for blog software to tell other another blog that they have linked to this article.

So if you want to write a comment about this article on your blog, you can ping my trackback url, and a link to your blog entry will show up on my blog under trackbacks.

by Pete Freitag on 03/06/2006 at 7:48:09 AM UTC