spam: October 2007 Archives

Once upon a time, when the web was a nicer place, trackbacks seemed to serve a useful purpose.

They're described as:

a framework for peer-to-peer communication and notifications between web sites. The central idea behind TrackBack is the idea of a TrackBack ping, a request saying, essentially, "resource A is related/linked to resource B." A TrackBack "resource" is represented by a TrackBack Ping URL, which is just a standard URI.

Using TrackBack, sites can communicate about related resources. For example, if Weblogger A wishes to notify Weblogger B that he has written something interesting/related/shocking, A sends a TrackBack ping to B. This accomplishes two things:

1. Weblogger B can automatically list all sites that have referenced a particular post on his site, allowing visitors to his site to read all related posts around the web, including Weblogger A's.
2. The ping provides a firm, explicit link between his entry and yours, as opposed to an implicit link (like a referrer log) that depends upon outside action (someone clicking on the link). (From the technical spec)

Unfortunately the level of "noise" these days renders trackbacks all but useless.

At any given time I have over two thousand unpublished trackbacks that have been automatically marked as spam.
If I actually get a valid trackback I'm probably going to delete it accidentally since it would be completely lost in the noise.

It's a pity. It would be nice to be able to use trackbacks to see what other people were saying or to let them know what you were saying about them, but at this stage it has become so abused that the only sane option seems to be disabling them completely.

What are other people doing?

Are you allowing trackbacks? (as opposed to pingbacks - which is a different implementation)