Traceback Spam
by Bijan Parsia
This blog doesn’t have an active comments section, which is neither here nor there, pretty much, but we do have an active spam section. Without Akismet it was just hopeless with hundreds of spam coments a day with only the rather clunky WordPress moderation system to handle it. (This is even with the annoying register before you comment system! Sheesh!) It still lets through quite a large amount of what seems to me to be trivially obvious spam. But I got caught by a bit of traceback spam…they extract part of your article into a drop quote, then wrap it with a little “these guys said…” sort of boilerplate. If the domain name is obscure or relevant, it’s pretty indistinguishable from a normal traceback. I generally check out the tracebacks to see what was said about an article, so I caught this.
But it’s really really really annoying and discouraging. Combine this with tracebacks from aggregators and aggregators of aggregators and extractors of aggregators and I’m aggravated! (Tracebacks from, e.g., a Planet site, on individual posts seem dodgy as well as aggravating. It’s really the wrong granularity. What’s significant is that you are on the aggegation list, not that such and such post has been aggregated.)
