Trackback is not dead
Filed under: cyberspace
Number of comments: 
Number of trackbacks: 
Tagged with: On some sites in the blogosphere I've recently read statements about trackback being dead. Jeremy Zawodny lists some links to articles stating that trackback is indeed dead in order to stir some discussion.
The main reason various writers present is the fact that 99% of incoming trackbacks are not legitimate trackbacks but spam. While there's definitely a lot of trackback spam going on I don't agree this means it's dead or on it's way towards being killed by the spammers.
Why trackbacks are interesting
Quite some people state they never receive relevant trackback pings but only trackback spam. On this weblog this is absolutely not true. On quite some other weblogs I visit from time to time I see the same thing. Trackback is a great way to associate a particular posting with postings on other weblogs. For the visitor it's an excellent way to easily find more information on the subject they're already reading about. I for one often find myself surfing to the links that have been posted by means of a trackback in order to find more interesting information on the subject than I already found in the original posting.
If trackback is dead then so are comments
On many blogs 99% or more out of all trackback pings are spam. However on most blogs, except for the ones that receive many comments, the majority of incoming comments are also spam. On this weblog, which unfortunately still isn't the busy place I'd like it to be, this is definitely true. Hundreds of spam comments and trackback spam attempts are blocked daily by my own blacklist software. Blogging without such a tool would be a living hell these days because there's so much spam going on lately it would almost be a full-time occupation to keep your blog spam-free if this needed to be done manually. Therefore most bloggers who have a clue use the appropriate anti-spam package for their particular weblog software. This tells me that the blogosphere has sort of 'accepted' the fact that there's comment-spam in a way like we've all accepted the fact that computer viruses exist and anti-virus tools are a necessity. Then why not think the same about trackbacks? With the appropriate tools it's quite easy to keep spammy trackbacks off your site. Pivot, the software I'm using to run this site doesn't have a moderation queue for comments or trackbacks. However with the proper strategy such a queue isn't even necessary. If you surf this site you'll see there are occational trackbacks and some more comments but none of them is spam. The trackbacks that are there are actually relevant and I'm most happy to have them.
Concluding thoughts
Spam is an annoying problem but it would really be a shame if we'd abandon a nice thing like trackback really is without fighting for it first. Of course Technorati is a nice way to find links to your site and services like PubSub look nice but to me nothing beats the direct linkage provided by trackback. It sure beats having to subscribe to and visit all kinds of other sites in order to find out who's got something interested to say on a subject you adressed earlier on your own blog.
Let's keep trackback alive!
At 28 August '05 - 03:31 IO ERROR wrote:
At 28 August '05 - 10:50 Marco wrote:
At 29 August '05 - 00:31 Fred wrote:
Interesting to see how people can connect together ;)
As I said in an answer to one of you comment on my blog, this is not just a question of spamming, this is a question of usability.
I mean, the idea and vision behind trackbacks is legitimate; however, can we improve trackbacks, can we integrate it in such a way that people will not have to know what trackbacks are to use them? I think that this is the question we have to ask.
As I also said, you have a dam cool blog, I am jealous ;)
Take care,
Salutations,
Fred
At 29 August '05 - 20:03 eric wrote:
I’ll tell you why I ask: In the first two weeks of August, I got about fifty-thousand of each.
I know this because they all came up 404. They all came up 404 because I had too much trackback and comment spam to deal with, so I disabled trackback and restricted comments to registered users, so the trackback URLs were accessing a feature that no longer existed.
Now, maybe a hundred thousand bogus page views (which amounted to about 6GB of traffic in 404 page views) doesn’t mean much to you, but it does to me. Those page views happened because of the existence of a trackback feature.
At 29 August '05 - 21:40 Marco wrote:
Comment spam and Trackback spam are peanuts in terms of data traffic compared to what my server has to chew on every day because of referrer spammers. If I were to follow your reasoning the only option would be to stop blogging, because blogging is what causes al this misery, right? ;)
At 30 August '05 - 15:39 eric wrote:
Frankly, I’ve never been sure what people mean by “referer spam”. Presumably that means that you’re linked-to by someone simply for the purpose of sucking up your google juice? I’m not clear on how that could cause data traffic that compares to what I served in 404s in the first half of August, before I hacked Drupal to serve a leaner 404. If I understand what referer [sic] spam is (and I hope you’ll correct & explain if I don’t), then the only traffic you’re going to get is from spiders, not from browsers. That’s going to be a few views a day per page, max, per spider. Some spiders don’t crawl that often.
Let me tell you what my real position is, stripped of rhetorical questions: Trackback in its current form is dead, because it was made to do things it was never meant to do. It was intended to aid in creating a web of links that was analogous to a conversation; instead, it was repurposed to the end of pumping up google juice by increasing the level of automation. That basically ruined it for everyone. (That you use it doesn’t mean it works as it ought to, or could, if it hadn’t been ruined.)
Now, my problems aren’t something you’re likely to see at the same level, because you’re just not vulnerable to the same kind of exploitation that I am for the simple reason that your URLs are constructed out of real words. Mine are constructed out of reserve words and simple, sequential-integer node IDs. (That looked like a nice, elegant feature when I first started using Drupal; now it looks like an engraved invitation to automated spambots.) All the spambot has to do is increment, increment, increment, increment….
To be fair, that’s a problem of software design, not even of trackback implementation, but it illustrates a point: Automation that doesn’t require a discovery step (as is the case with many trackback implementations) will expose the platform to expoitation. If someone wants to automate trackback spamming to WordPress or MT, they just have to go about it in a different and slightly more labor intensive way than they would for Drupal. But once the Drupal orchards are no longer fruitful, they’ll get to you. Their bandwidth and CPU cycles are cheap.
Trackback should be manual, anyway. It doesn’t need to be fully manual, but there should never by auto-discovery, and no system should be designed to post trackbacks automatically. That’s like free candy to hyperactive children. I’d love to see it somehow rescued; I just don’t believe it’s going to happen.
At 30 August '05 - 16:30 Marco wrote:
First of all, referrer spam is done by software that pulls pages from your site while sending a fake referrer header in the process. This in order to get their link in last-referrer lists or stats pages people may or may not have on their websites / weblogs. This means they are not getting a lean 404 or 403 but they’re actually fetching a whole page from your site. On this server I get at least 10 hits per minute with referrer spam, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If it weren’t for an enormous load of strict .htaccess rules causing them to receive a small 403 Forbidden document this would literally cost gigabytes of bandwidth.
Regarding your remarks about Drupal (or any other CMS software), the ‘guessable’ patterns exist in any weblog software. In Pivot the trackback URL’s are guessable and so are the full-article view pages. Even though I have nice URL’s, /weblog/pivot/entry.php?id=xxx still works fine here as well. The nice URL’s are only a matter of nifty rewrite rules. The underlying system is intact.
The point of my story is the fact that I consider it a shame to collectively drop a rather nice piece of functionality that adds interactivity and interconnectivity just because some black-hats are abusing it for spam purposes. We’re not going to take off our commentforms either so why should trackback be abandoned. In my view we should simply develop means of defending ourselves against mis-use of trackback just like most of us have done for comment-spam. In another article of mine I describe a way to protect trackbacks against spammers. It works very well, therefore I have no reason to disable trackback on this website at all.