Trackback spam
06 Jan 2005Oh. 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.