I’ve turned off trackback for this entire domain.

I was so happy last week to feel like I’d finally conquered the comment spam problem – or at least get it sufficiently under control that I wasn’t daily considering turning off comments altogether, and then today I login to MT to find I’ve got myself a little nest of trackback pings. I used MT-Blacklist to delete them, but STILL.

It seems that somewhen on or near February 5th (which was my dad’s birthday, incidentally) some asshat learned how to use trackback pings to savage web servers. Trackback link spam is, apparently, less like comment spamming and lot more like a DOS attack, but the results still up spammers’ numbers in engine rankings.

Why do they do it? Well, you can read this interview with a link spammer to get an idea. How does it affect webmasters and webmistresses everywhere? Read this heartfelt post called No one can have nice things! that I thought sums it up quite coherently.

To fix it, turn of trackback. This article, Trackback Spam Attack, tells how.

Or, less drastically, you can use .htaccess – instructions available here and/or here.