Oh. My. Good­ness. Every­one else had been talk­ing about it, but thus far my part of the world had remained rel­a­tively unaf­fected by it all — until this morn­ing. I woke up at around 6, got up, checked my email, and (so I thought) my blog com­ments, before going back to sleep and wak­ing again around 9ish. At which point I was greeted with in excess of 40 track­back spam com­ments, most (all? Does WP apply fil­ters to track­backs? These were pretty bla­tant — sex, incest, bes­tial­ity — all plainly spelt for my fil­ters to sup­pos­edly recog­nise — but still got through) of which were dis­played on var­i­ous pages of the blog.

Damn.

I very nearly dis­abled ping/trackbacks as a knee-jerk response to the whole thing, but didn’t. What the hell do spam­mers aim to gain by doing this!? In the case of blog-spam, espe­cially! DO YOU SEE MY REACTION?! I’M NOT CLICKING YOUR LINKS TO SEE PICTURES OF INCEST AND BESTIALITY! I’M CONSIDERING CLOSING OTHERWISE LEGITIMATE AVENUES OF COMMUNICATION JUST TO SEE YOU FAIL.

Let’s all have a round of applause for their search engine opti­mi­sa­tion tech­niques. Not. It’s not even a direct inbound link, which means it car­ries less weight with search engines any­way! Con­sid­er­ing you appear to be flaunt­ing all kinds of fil­ter sys­tems, at least take advan­tage of it and do it prop­erly! Morons. And, you know what? I care enough that next time I get hit, I’ll take the time to remove all the com­ment spam over again. If a search engine spi­ders me in that moment, your rank increases, right up until it spi­ders me again and it’s all removed. Dare I say it, design­ing porn sites with ALT text and seman­tics in mind for the ulti­mate “blind user” is actu­ally more intel­li­gent than their cur­rrent spam­ming methods.

Realise some­thing: Your track­backs are utterly unfil­tered at this point in time. Word­Press is open source, free-as-in-beer (porn?) soft­ware. Any­one who had a shred of IT knowl­edge and 20 min­utes could tell you that the track­backs would get through. Fur­ther, they would tell you that direct links weigh higher than indi­rect con­tent links from exter­nal pages in terms of SEO. And yet the track­backs are noth­ing more than strings of words, with the ONLY link being an orig­i­nat­ing loca­tion link (for the trackback) — I’m NOT say­ing the entire con­tent should be wrapped in an a tag — I’m say­ing the con­tent itself is utterly not what it should be. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, even spam­mers and porn net­works should be capa­ble of com­pe­tently con­struct­ing brief mes­sages using cor­rect sen­tence struc­ture and the like, whilst keep­ing a max­i­mum of key­words intact. Why am I say­ing this? I couldn’t clearly explain. I’m angry, and the only way I can (ratio­nally) vent is by demon­strat­ing (tech­ni­cally, ignor­ing all moral or other issues) what they’re doing wrong, and how this makes them igno­rant pigs. Yes, I’d rather use stronger lan­guage. No, I’m not going to.

As a mat­ter of defi­ance, please, if you’ve read this post and hold sim­i­lar views on the sub­ject, send me a track­back. Just to show there’s legit­i­mate use for it, and it needn’t be dis­qual­i­fied because of the crim­i­nal acts of spam­mers. And, if you know of any (vig­i­lante or not) cam­paigns in the works sim­i­lar to Make Love Not Spam, let me know. Please.

I’ve dis­abled com­ment­ing for this post to encour­age peo­ple to use track– and ping-backs. Hav­ing said that, if you have some­thing to say and don’t have a blog or access to ping/trackback facil­i­ties, head over to the Con­tact page and drop me a line with what you want to say, and we’ll fig­ure out a way to get it posted.