Two’s a trend
David Weinberger: I’ve turned off trackbacks on this site because I’m getting about 100 a day, of which a tiny percentage aren’t spam. Too bad. Trackbacks address a real need.
Well, again, crap. It does me no good to be utterly ping-spam-free if nobody accepts them anymore, especially since I depend on people who send them also accepting them.
While not mentioned in my piece, I actually haven’t been sending them much either. Not that that helps. :)
Rather sad, really, as 99% of the trackback spam appears to be coming from a single ’bot (which recently seems to have undergone an upgrade to version 2.0, ”fixing” its erstwhile telltale
HTTP_Viaheader).It’s been responsible for 1925 trackback attempts on my MT installation so far this month. Which is rather surprising, as it only made 1727 trackback attempts during the entire month of May.
Ouch. That’s rather a lot.
Not counting silently-discarded things like GETs or invalid IDs, I’ve gotten 14 this month, mostly bardak.com.ru and someone who insistently pings with various pages in docs.rage.net.
Nah, hardly notice it.
But I suppose that, if I weren’t successfully blocking them, I might get rather tired rather quickly.
What puzzles me is their curious persistence. You’d think that, after 12,567 unsuccessful trackback attempts (since January 22), they might catch a clue.
I guess there’s no underestimating the boneheadedness of your typical spammer.