Just for the record, if you found

mrG — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:47:50 -0400

Just for the record, if you found this item, you've no doubt noticed the lack of TrackBack on TeledyN. Turns out, TB was just another ill-thought-out 'innovation' which may have an operant definition as

in'-nova-tion - n - that which spontaneously and spectacularly self-implodes

Trackback, as implemented in MT and emulated by everyone else, was nothing more than a free no-restrictions, no-filter, no-authorization-required means to blast whatever message you like into whatever page you wished within the TB universe. And they did, in droves.

in the parlance of computer security, TrackBack was a self-inflicted trojan infection, a broadcast advertised 'back-door' free-for-all invitation for spam.

and we're surprised it didn't work out?

In one afternoon, I cleared over 500 trackback postings from across hundreds of items here on TeledyN, and that was just one day. Each day there was more. I switched to Drupal where there was a content spam filter, but it was Bayesian and pattern based, which are trvially aesy ot deefeat, and to make matters worse, the source, title and link of the TB (or comment) posts were granted access bypassing all filters.

I hunted around for solutions. "Oh, TB spam won't happen" was the head-in-the-sand response I got from developers. They aren't laughing anymore, but I did learn not to bother geeks with Reality. My favourite was, "Use WordPress", ie that kit famous for spamming itself in a bid to jam AdSense, but even there, in two questions I met the same head-in-the-sand response because, no, it really didn't deal with TB spam, not completely.

Others recommended holding-tanks, also the strategy of MT for comment posts, but those just take too much time to be worth the bother because I don't want to sift through 500 un-informative "you have a comment" emails (itself overrun by spam) looking for the one or two posts that are legitimate and relevent comments. Drupal was especially bad there as the list of held messages lets you

edit or approve the message without seeing what post it amends
delete it without reading it
pass it to the Bayesian where God only knows what effect the random prose will have on legit posts

a bug in the early drupal spam filter 'delete this' function also inadvertently deleted all the comments and trackbacks on the entire site, the sudden flash of which made losing those future comments that much easier to endure.

So, in a widely quoted article, I just switched it off; throwing the baby out with the cesswater, true, and I do miss what was good about the process, including the TB self-discovery side-effect self-referential cross-linking within this site, but when the publishing process consumes more time than the actual prose composition, well, something has to give.

TrackBack for Everybody Else

mrG — Tue, 25 Mar 2003 18:23:12 -0500

Just as expected, we have word via Joho the Blog on Ben and Mena's Beginner's Guide to TrackBack

This is a form of remote comments--rather than posting the comment directly on Person B's weblog, Person A posts it on his own weblog, then sends a TrackBack ping

eminently readable. Those of you who are not yet using MoveableType, skip ahead to the Current Applications.

TeledyN - TrackBack for Everybody Else - Comments

Just for the record, if you found

TrackBack for Everybody Else