Stopping trackback spam

A lot of blogs have been getting hammered with trackback spam -- online c*s*nos, online p*k*r, and ph*nt*rm*ne -- over the last month. I tried to dodge it by renaming my trackback script, which stopped the stupider spambots, but one spambot was smart enough to figure it out, and I was still getting a dozen or more spam pings a day.

The spam trackbacks were all aimed at older entries. The spammers aren't really interested in being read; they are trying to increase the Google page rank of their websites. The rel="nofollow" patch is supposed to remove some of the incentive for doing that.

So I installed a plug-in called MT-Close2, which I read about in an entry on defeating trackback spam on the Learning Movable Type blog. MT-Close2 closes comments and trackbacks for entries based on user-specified criteria.

The downside is that it won't be possible for legitimate pingers to trackback to entries on BatesLine that are more than about two weeks old. The upside is that I haven't had a single spam ping since installing MT-Close2, but I am still getting legitimate pings. If you are trying to ping an entry and can't because it's more than a couple of weeks old, e-mail me at blog at batesline dot com, and I'll see what I can do.