Ready, Aye, Ready

It’s mostly just all the buggers trying to run an obnoxious means to put their clients’ ratings up in search lists.

b2evolution used to have “top 10 referrers” on the home page. That actually worked and was a fun feature for quite a while. It only seems to be within the past year or two, actually, where the jerkfolks have decided to ramp up automated fake referrer tags and fake trackbacks. Fake comments have been going for a little longer than that, but you’d figure you’d get a breather.

The developers contemplated keeping some of the feature, but working with Google to make a new “nofollow” tag on anchors that Googlebot would read and not follow, but that doesn’t prevent you getting inundated with crap :)

*sigh*

How much crap did you get from re-enabling trackbacks and how long did you have them re-enabled?

Yeah, I learned the lesson early. Doh :/

I had the trackbacks up for about two days and spent a lot of time adding banned sites to the spam filter. Probably I got in the order of 120 spam referrals. As this is all authorized before it appears on the weblog, my personal email was beginning to overflow with b2e notifications.

Holy crap - in retrospect, I’m sorry I gave you blog slot number 5. I think spam-spiders had already traced that out from all my postings where I used to include the 5.

Bloody jerks, still.

I wonder if it would be possible to move you to slot number 6 somehow. Perhaps an appropriate SQL statement in MySQL Admin might do it.

Though you better believe I’d make a backup before trying it :)

Ah, probably not worth it. The sploggers would probably find you eventually. I wonder how other people survive their trackbacks? Probably just whitelists or somesuch.

If you wanted to do trackbacks to other people, perhaps we could code together a safe-list feature, i.e. whitelist any sites that you attempt to trackback to (before the trackback is attempted, so that if they check for mutual trackback ability, it will pass).

Ah, projects, projects :)