So much for that failed blog element. Trackbacks are supposed to be an automated linking system between blogs that refer to each other. Say if Blog A has an interesting post, and the author of Blog B writes his own entry which refers to Blog A, complete with a link. When Blog B publishes this entry, his blog software will send a “trackback ping” to Blog A, informing him of the reference. Blog A will often catch this ping and automatically make a link right back to Blog B within the original entry’s comment section. A nice idea–you link to me, I link back to you, we know we’re talking about each other. Community. Cooperation. Swell.

The problem: spam. What else? Now, maybe once a month, at most, I get a genuine trackback ping. In that same time period, I get tens of thousands of fake trackback pings from spammers (called “spings“). What’s more, these fake pings show up in my referrals (AwStats, not Google Analytics) and make a further hash of the numbers beyond what referral spam does. It got so bad that after my spam logs got so flooded that it caused a server error and I had to purge the database, within a half an hour, 114 more trackback spams had started filling it back up again. It got to the point where comment spam was beginning to look like a minor annoyance.

Mind you, the filters were working–no trackbacks were getting through. But I have no real use for trackbacks anyway, so I got a special utility and closed off all the trackbacks for all the entries in the entire blog, and then I switched off the trackback script. And good riddance.