… they’re just ‘resting’.
That is to say, the current state of blog trackbacks is utter crap – but that’s enough to propel people to find a solution. I realized this yesterday, when I accidentally trackbacked someone I shouldn’t have. I e-mailed them to let them know, and got back a reply that said it was okay, since “most of my trackbacks are spam anyway.”
Hmmm, I thought – there’s got to be a technical solution for this, maybe the type of Bayesian filter that’s applied to detect spam e-mails could be modified to detect spam blogs. Now, if I have an idea about something technical, twenty other people have probably beat me to it, so I did a search, and found Kailash Nadh’s ‘Fighting spam blogs – a hypothesis.’ Which pretty much says the same thing, just from the mouth of someone who could actually implement it, and focused on detecting ‘spam blogs‘ instead of phony trackbacks.
If someone like Kailash is paying attention to the problem, I’m confident it’ll be solved. After all, the guy’s only eighteen has already built an amazingly-fast ping service called Pingoat (that beats the hell out of Ping-o-matic) as well as a blog publishing service called boastMachine. Any angel investor types want to pay him to whip up a solution?
UPDATE: Read Marco van Hylckama Vlieg’s “Trackback is Not Dead” about two minutes after I read this entry. Which led me to Jeremy Zawodny’s collection of articles and Marco’s own work to fix the problem, which relies on uniquely-generated trackback URLs that expire after 15 minutes.
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I must say I’ve been unpleasantly surprised by how many bloggers just give up trackback so easily because of the spammers. Blogs belong to the bloggers. The motto of my anti-spam package for Pivot reads ‘Take back your blog!’ and I for one intend to do so. It turned out to be not so hard to kill trackback spam after all. No CPU intensive (bayesian) scanning is necessary at all. Currently I’m simply using some javascript to fool the spammer and if they ever become clever enough to interpret my javascript, execute it and spam me anyway I’ll simply modify it and add a small trivial ‘check question’ visitors have to answer in order to obtain a trackback key. Simple and impossible to crack. It’s time we start re-animating trackback before it’s really dead.