A Life Less Interesting

Wow, there has been a huge surge in Trackback spam today, with someone trying to publicise their disgusting porn sites by spamming my blog (and billions of others) with fake trackbacks.

Their hope is that they will get published on all these blogs and so increase their search engine rank since they have lots of people linking to them (That's one of the factors Google uses in its black-magic ranking algorithm)

Well, thanks to Movable Type 3.2's inbuilt spam fighting feature none of their attempts have succeeded. They have either been junked immediately, or held in limbo until I manually approve or reject them.

Following this onslaught I've tweaked the blogs settings so that more of them get junked in the first place. Still, deleting them manually takes about 3 clicks in total.

Trackbacks in general are a pretty good idea, as they allow fellow bloggers who comment on other peoples entries to let those people know they are being talked about. It increases exposure in general and gives a warm-fuzzy feeling. It used to be that trackbacks were accepted by default, immediately getting listed alongside your websites content which is why they made such a juicy target for spammers. The age old arms race then began between spammers and spam blockers. I think the current implementation in MT 3.2 is very good. It pulled in a third-party anti-spam plugin and embraced it, tying it in to the main body of the code enabling it to do much more in the fight against spam.

Good job so far I say!