phil ringnalda

Matt Haughey : No one can have nice things!

So, instead of worrying about this any longer or having to check off 200+ delete boxes again, I turned off trackbacks.

Shelley Powers : Conversation

Even if you don’t specifically address a post in your writing, if you think the readers of the post would be interested in what you wrote, you could send a trackback and help the conversation flow. Referrer tracking in Technorati and other tools doesn’t provide this. However, since people aren’t using Trackbacks for this purpose, maybe it is time to close the door on this functionality.

Joe Jenett : Sorry, no more TrackBacks, but I’ve got PingLinks baby!

Since I don’t really care to waste my time dancing with these characters, especially the more-than-innocuous type, this blog will no longer accept automated trackback pings.

Back in the day, I loved TrackBack. Oh, God, I burned with love for it. I could see, so very clearly, just how and where it brilliantly met a need. People saying so to the contrary, it’s not a two-way street, or not the way they think: a post sending a ping doesn’t necessarily need to link to the post it is pinging. It’s a great way of saying “if you were interested in that, or want to know the answer to the question that posed, you might want to read this.”

But then came Pingback, a very different thing that meets a different need (a clean list of referrers), but was marketed as a better designed alternative to TrackBack, and worse yet perceived as competition. So Movable Type got the horrible perversion of autodiscovery pinging, sending a TrackBack ping to anything that any post links to, rather than only those where the author felt that a reader of the pinged post would also want to read her post. Now, by far the bulk of the pings I receive are not saying “if you were interested in that, or want to know the answer to the question that posed, you might want to read this,” but instead are saying “I linked to that.” That’s something I and any of my readers with an interest already know, from the referrers I show at the bottom of every post.

So for me, TrackBack was already spoiled, long before the spam started. In fact, the spam isn’t bothering me, thanks to something I’m not foolish enough to discuss in public, but I still feel a bit spammed by TrackBack. If you link to one of my posts, I’m more than happy to link back to you (several times over, since I’m no good at figuring out the one true permalink for a variety of referrers), but having a bunch of “I linked to this” TrackBacks show up in the middle of a comment conversation doesn’t sit right.

Where I thought TrackBack shone was as an unembarrassing way of leaving a comment that says “Hey, I said something about this too, over <a href=””>here</a>.” By turning that awkward bit of self-promotion into something technological, and slightly less personal and needy, TrackBack opened up a way to let interested readers follow more of a cross-blog thread. But because they wanted to let TrackBack be anything, not just what it was, and because (I think, based on some really wide open sloppy holes at the start) they didn’t really think about the potential for abuse at all, it’s wound up being pretty much meaningless.

Maybe Joe’s “bung your link in this form, and submit it, and we’ll see how I feel about linking to it” PingLinks takes enough of the automation out to make it meaningful again, or maybe we need to not just have the optional moderation we should have had long ago, but have moderation of TrackBack pings be the expected thing, changing the semantics from “TrackBack is an easy way for you to insert a link to your post in someone else’s post” to “TrackBack is a way for you to offer an easy way for someone else to insert a link to your post in their post.” It would be painful and cruel, sending out pings and then having to see that someone didn’t judge your post worthy of a link, but then it’s also painful and cruel to be put in the position of deciding between deleting a ping that adds absolutely nothing, and leaving it for interested readers to follow, only to find that it’s nothing more than a link back to where they just were.