Killing the Trackback Spam

Originally published: 05/2006 by J Wynia

After talking to several other site owners, it seems the sudden increase in trackback spam that this site has undergone in the last week or so isn't an isolated event. I use Akismet on this Wordpress setup, but 150 comments got through from the time I left work today until after dinner. Most of that was trackback spam. I had turned trackbacks off in the admin panel a while back, but discovered that there's no reasonable way to shut them off retroactively, leaving about 400 posts open to this crap. I had figured that I just needed to do a quick SQL query to shut it off on the old posts too, and finally looked tonight and ran this little query. We'll see if it at least stops the trackback problem.


UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status = 'closed';

We seriously need a fully Bayesian filter for Wordpress. Now.

Comments

logtar on 5/23/2006
I have a couple of post that are pretty bad offenders when it comes to trackback... I might give this solution a try... thanks for the tip.
J Wynia on 5/24/2006
It appears to have completely stemmed the flow. Not one trackback spam all night.
miklb on 5/24/2006
Have you tried using Bad Behavior? I'm not sure the type of traffic your site gets, but I run several blogs, and haven't had any of the issues I've read about. I simply use BB and Spam Karma 2.
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