Burningbird has given trackbacks the boot for the time being because of the rising tide of trackback sp@m. I’m starting to read about tb sp@m at more and more sites, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before the problem becomes exceptionally widespread.
The thing with trackback sp@m that makes it more dangerous (in my opinion) is the same thing that makes it great — the sheer number of tools that support trackback. With comment sp@m, the majority of the affected sites were run on MovableType. With trackback, it’s basically the same format across all blog tools. Scary.
Burningbird makes a pretty good plea to the “blog gods”, and I would certainly echo these sentiments:
Stop screwing around with Atom and RSS. Stop playing with OPML. Let the politicians kiss the babies by themselves. Forgo the next conference, you’ve been to enough of them, and stop talking about social software and lets do something about it.
Help us fix these damn holes, once and for all. I will plunk down what few bucks I can spare, or just point me to a module, and tell me what you want me to code and I’ll code it. But one solution, only, that will work for everyone.
Why do spammers target blogs? The presumption is that blogs are getting great search engine placement. I can understand that (in general) as most are timely, updated frequently, and offer a lot of content on some pretty specific topics.
My question is this, why wouldn’t a spammer just start their own blog? Then they could point to whatever miracle organ enhancing drug they wanted to straight from their site. Duh.
Great another spam thing to worry about. Sometimes I wish we had some laws on spam… including my door, windshield, email, comments, trackback, etc.
why wouldn’t a spammer just start their own blog?
They probably don’t have their own blogs, because it costs money. You have to pay for hosting space, etc. It’s cheaper to let someone else pay for the site, and then fill up their comments (or whatever) with spam. I wonder if there are any honeypot-blogs out there?
I had read somewhere that they attack blogs because they think blogs are a waste of space on the internet… isn’t this sort of like the pot calling the kettle black? 😉