Well, I’ve had several requests over the past few months for a version of DYPM that stops trackback spam.

I’m starting to think that it isn’t possible with the current capabilities of Wordpress.

Fundamentally, gives you no means of doing any kind of challenge/response when someone creates a trackback - leaving only moderation and content filtering styles of stopping trackbacks.

This is frustrating - and easily fixed with a change to the trackback protocol and wordpress’s UI, but short of branching Wordpress and adding this feature, it’s unsolvable by the likes of me a simple plugin developer. I have 190 spam trackbacks and no real ones, so I have changed my private version of DYPM to reintroduce the ‘bug’ that stopped trackbacks.

It just seems an open invitation to spammers - and only a minor loss in functionality to remove it.

I feel Wordpress needs is a massive commitment to anti-spam at all levels of its activity, go take a look at http://www.herod.net/spam/ and see the records of the spam I’ve rejected over the last few months to see what I mean.

Oh, and you know what the most popular entry is for them to spam?  The one about me beating spammers - ah, the irony!

Sunday, October 29th, 2006 @ 6:22 pm Technology
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