The idea of trackbacks and pingbacks are great. It’s a way of getting notified when someone else posts about you on their blog. However, spammers have taken over and it makes you wonder if there is any value in trackbacks anymore.

My guess is that most bloggers will say that the value is little to none. The number of spammy trackbacks are overwhelming at times and, even if you do have a good spam plugin protecting you, the ones that get through are not quality. The chances that a good trackback comes into your site is rare, but when it does, it is great to see.

The idea of trackbacks is fantastic, however it is to easy for spammers to abuse; and they know that. The system has been corrupt for a while and it makes a blogger think that it may be time to just disable them and forget about them.

What do you think?

Do you still see value in trackbacks and pingbacks? Or have you disabled them and let them die?

Yes, trackbacks/pingbacks are dead. Lets turn them off.

If you’d like to disable trackbacks on your WordPress blog, go into your blogs settings and then click ‘discussion’ and un-check the box for ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)’

Some web hosts do not allow for plugins such as Akismet to function properly. This is because they turn off the PHP function fsockopen for security reasons.  When they do this, any plugin that connects to an outside source doesn’t function correctly.  The biggest issue then is the inflow of spam.

I’ve found two plugins that seem to help take control of spam comments and trackbacks when Akismet isn’t available.  Neither are perfect, but together they make a world of difference in the fight against spam.

The first is Cookies for Comments.  This plugin places a cookie into the visitors browser when they arrive at your site.  Once they leave a comment, the plugin checks to see if that cookie exists.  If there is no cookie, then it’s marked as spam.  From my testing, it works quite well.

The second is Simple Trackback Validation.  This plugin checks the site that is supposedly leaving the trackback and ensures that the IP is good and that the site is actually linking to yours.

The downside to both plugins is that they either pull all questionable comments & trackbacks into moderation or they delete them.  This means that you’ll continue to get flooded with moderation requests or they’ll just be deleted and, if something is marked spam accidentally, you’ll never know.

Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason. Some days they are even successful. In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues. It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.

Blog #1 – The iFrame – The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load. It seemed abnormally long. I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.

When the did finally load, it then asked me if I wanted to run a Java applet. Huge red flag there. It took some digging but I found a lot of files contained some iFrame code that was loading badware from an external site.

To fix, I deleted and re-uploaded all the files I could, and walked though each theme and plugin file to find any traces of code that should not be there. Once cleaned out, the site ran much smoother.

Blogging is fun and rewarding. There are so many good things about it, but comment and trackback spam can tarnish the process. I know that going in and removing 15 different ‘prescription’ comments is not a good use of a bloggers time as they could use it towards creating new posts. But how does one control it?

You can protect comments with a captcha plugin, Spam Karma or Askimet, but what about trackbacks?

Lately I’ve been testing out the Simple Trackback Validation plugin. It checks two items to ensure that the trackback is legit.

1. It checks the page that claims to be linking to your post to ensure it does.
2. Checks the IP address of the blog the tracback is coming from and the IP of the trackback. They should be the same. In order for these to be different, a spam bot must be auto generating the trackbacks.

It also has a feature to toss any questionable trackbacks into moderation.

So far in my testing I can’t already say if it’s working or not. No trackbacks have gone into moderation, yet trackback spam seems to be more under control, but not gone.

For a new blogger, getting comments or trackbacks is exciting. However, some of them could be automated spambots filling up your comments with links to sites you wouldn’t want your visitors seeing. Spam plugins can do wonders at stopping spam, but some manual work is required. Here are a few tricks to help new bloggers identify possible spam.

1- What name did the commenter leave? Was it Sam or Jill? Or was it Used Cars or Baby Blankets? Most spammers use keyword phrases as they think it’ll help out their site; which it won’t.

2- What URL did they leave as their homepage? Does the URL look like a laundry list of keywords? http://www.shop-for-ipods.com/ipod-deals/best-ipod-prices.htm. Trying to hard is an indication that the link may be spam.

3- Was their comment generic? Sure, not everyone leaves detailed comments, but an indication of spam may be a comment such as “Great Website”,”I’m really glad I found your blog”, “This is really good content.” Chances are that these comments came from someone who never read your post.

Recently the blogs I monitor have been getting hit with a lot of spam that Akismet doesn’t seem to catch. Here is an example:

Author: used auto detroit

Comment: used auto detroit

Info about used auto detroit.

The good news is I’ve come up with a simple solution. Just go into your blogs admin, click on options and then on discussion. In the comments moderation area, add /strong to the list. Next time one of these comments make it through, they’ll be held for moderation instead of going live.

Notice, I didn’t say that this was a fix. You could add /strong to the comment blacklist area but you may filter out good comments too. Seeing as strong tags are OK to use in WordPress comments, a real visitor could use it. Plus, some blogs tell users that they can use basic formatting. That’s why we throw it into moderation and not just throw it away.

I’ve recently been using Akismet as my spam plugin for WordPress. It had been doing great, until this weekend. All of a sudden, spam started piling up and I was kept busy trying to remove it all. It’s amazing how great spam plugins do work, when they work. I ended up turning on Spam Karma for a while and that fixed everything.

It turns out that Akismet was down over the weekend for some updates. All should be good now though.

It really makes a person realize how great spam plugins are.  Maybe it’s time to donate a few bucks.

[tags]akismet,spam-karma[/tags]