Via David Tiley we have an interview with one the scumbags who comment spam blogs. One of them just finally left my blog alone after trying to leave about a hundred trackback spams. I deleted the first few that arrived, and found that it was posting new ones as fast as I deleted them. I renamed my trackback flavour so that it wasn't called "trackback" anymore and that stopped the spams from getting through.
It was so bad that hostmatters(who provides space for tons of blogs) was down this morning. I had to delete my trackback file as well.
I think even you'd agree that spammers should be shot. With a gun. And that Lott could then write about how guns are effective against spam. And you could say they're not and . . .
noticed in the link "foadspammer"
Heh.
The bastards are going to destroy trackback. The only solution is that you check that there is a link to your blog before you accept the trackback, but I think most people will just turn it off.
SayUncle --
I'm afraid Lott will have to find something else to do, since Kieran Healy already solved the problem of spam.
I hate to say this, but so what? Trackback is a silly protocol anyway, and the major web logging programs implement it in a completely incompetent way (witness the number of repreated trackbacks you see on typical "Movable Type" web logs -- the idiots at Six Apart don't even hash the parameters they're passed and drop duplicates...).
Unfortunately the right way to do the "which blogs link to me?" thing is with a robot which crawls the web -- Technorati, or, better, something with a decent data center behind it like Google. An edge-triggered approach is just wrong.