As with many other folks around the online writing community, I’ve gone ahead and disabled Trackbacks until such time as I can find a reasonable way to moderate them as I moderate my comments, both of which have recently been awash in spam. The comment spam — between 600 and 1,000 per day — you don’t see because I’ve got a moderation widget to block about 99.9% of it. Alas, I do not have a trackback spam widget that does the same job, and while I’m not getting the immense amount of spam that I’m getting from the comment avenue, I am getting about 200 trackback spams a day, which is more than enough to swamp any value trackbacks actually have for me. If I want to see who is linking to me, I have Technorati and my log files — and you have technorati, too, if you’re itchin’ to know who’s linking to me and when.
I assume at some point in the reasonably near future Six Apart or someone will develop a Trackback widget that will allow me to excise spam trackbacks before they show up on my site, at which time I’ll re-enable trackbacks (such a thing may already exist — if you know of it, please let me know). Until then, however, this site is trackback-less.
