Killing the Trackback Spam

May
23
2006

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.

Posted in General, General Internet, Programming, Software, Web Development |

 

Comments on this post

Feedback is always welcome. Read some from other folks or leave your own below. Just keep things civil and remember that what you post lives on in public. Forever.

Thanks,
J

3 Responses to “Killing the Trackback Spam”

  1. logtar Says:
    May 23rd, 2006 at 9:30 pm

    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.

  2. J Wynia Says:
    May 24th, 2006 at 6:24 am

    It appears to have completely stemmed the flow. Not one trackback spam all night.

  3. miklb Says:
    May 24th, 2006 at 9:31 am

    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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