Closed Trackback

I removed the trackback script from the system which means there is no way to post track back to this site. I also removed the trackback information from the page.

The Death of Trackback on My Site

Three years, trackback brought a lot of fun to me, when not many people blog and not many people know about blog. That was really exciting expertiment.

Recently, many people know blogging, especially many “smart” spammers. They turn to use Trackback in a more efficient way than normal bloggers. They send thousands of trackbacks to my site.

After putting about 3400 different patterns and IP addresses into my MT-Blacklist, there are just increasing number of spammers join the Trackback Spam Club. I bet it will be a problem in Chinese blog sphere some time, but so far, so good.

In the last year, I deleted about 10 thousands trackback spams, and my blacklist is blocking several about 200 trackback pings everyday.

The Death of Innovation?

I regret to shutdown my trackback, and I believe many people will do the same after spammers get more and more smart. I hope I can reopen the system after I upgrade to MovableType 3.0 or higher, and get protected by better spam prevention tools. But for now, sorry.

Faithful for the Truth Instead of Dream

Trackback is a good idea, but periodically, before better anti-spam tools/standard is aviable, I am more concerned with the success of the content and reader experience, instead of insisting on a technology.

Just as DDOS attack educated that the Internet is built on a weak infrustructure, trackback proposes very high risk when someone what a DDOS to a site – how about try to enter 10G of data into the disk of a blogging system – if the system has 10G or more to fill?

I Hope I can Turn it On Some Time

Just like Push technology Channel failed in IE 4, RSS changed to a new way to do the same thing after several years, I hope we have better ways to leverage the idea of trackback after 3 years. I hope I can turn trackback again in Oct of the year 2008.

10 thoughts on “Closed Trackback

  1. Hi Jianshuo, I know this is an unrelated post, but how do you feel about the space launch of two Chinese astronauts this week? Maybe you can do a post on it? :-)

  2. Maybe change the backlist to whitelist can resolve this problem.

    Donew blog homepage ever was bothered by blog spam , everyone complain there is so many spam article on DonewBlog homepage. keso everyday was busy with find and delete spam. So I say,”why not try to use whitelist?”

    Now Donew blog homepage use whitelist and recommendation to protect the homepage .

    like this http://blog.donews.com/PromotePost.aspx?id=588010

    Sorry,my english is so poor …….

  3. Short of time can’t be so easy an excuse :) You should have done this job well, but you won’t if you just give up on the half way far from the end line. The underlying reason for your closing trackback in such haste without spending another couple of hours to try more is that: there must be something more important, which may be more attractive, for you to spend time and effort into. People often turn to such things at roadcross of life in the end. You’re an ordinary mortal, and it’s your right to pursue for power or money or something else. But as you choose to give up the underground lines of blogging, this time to close trackback, you’re just missing your original dream and losing your heart. Of course it can’t be so real if you’d have starting to blog

    just for fame.

    Good luck, pal.

  4. Well. The fundamental reason is, I didn’t receive any valid trackback for the previous half year and only receive about 2 or 3 valid trackback in the last whole year. So to work on something that only 2 or 3 people use is not something I want to do now, even though it only takes 1 hour. Of cause, I hope I hope I can be able to turn it back one day if it becomes valid, or my current guess is, this technology I had so much passion on will die sometime down to the path.

  5. Keep it Simple. Spam is hell, maybe soon u’ll also have to ask people to type a 5digits code while posting a comment.

  6. Still internet is an eye ball catching business. Once your traffic is large, other want to ride along with, and SPAM does make money, so they try hard and ‘smart’.

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