How I Stopped 99.9% Of Spam From Even Being Posted

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I’ve just released Disable Trackbacks, a plugin I’ve been using for a while now.

The vast, vast majority of pings sent from other sites are done via pingbacks, not via the old trackback system (I think I’ve gotten like 3 legitimate ones this year or something). However, spammers just love them to death and is pretty much the only ping system they use. So, I wrote this plugin a week or so ago and enabled it on my blog. I’ve gone from a few thousand spams a day to next 0-5 a day. A worthy tradeoff if you ask me (ignoring the couple legitimate ones a year to avoid literally hundreds of thousands of spams).

I also run Cookies For Comments to avoid regular comment spam. In order to post a cookie comment on my site, you must have stylesheets and cookies enabled. Since this is a personal website that isn’t mission critical, I can make that requirement.

Finally Defensio picks up any spams that make it though which are mainly pingbacks from spam blogs (aka splogs).

Spam problem solved, at least for now…

Please leave any comments about my “Disable Trackbacks” plugin on it’s homepage.

3 thoughts on “How I Stopped 99.9% Of Spam From Even Being Posted”

  1. That’s a great plugin idea, but one quick comment: If you disable trackbacks, you might want to remove the Trackback url right before “Leave A Comment” on your homepage.

    Also:
    “In order to post a cookie on my site, you must have stylesheets and cookies enabled.”
    Post a cookie?

  2. Queue on September 8th, 2008 at 5:20 AM wrote:

    That’s a great plugin idea, but one quick comment: If you disable trackbacks, you might want to remove the Trackback url right before “Leave A Comment” on your homepage.

    Meant to, but forgot. Thanks for reminding me.

    Queue on September 8th, 2008 at 5:20 AM wrote:

    Also:
    “In order to post a cookie on my site, you must have stylesheets and cookies enabled.”
    Post a cookie?

    Whoops. “In order to post a comment…”

  3. Weird. I almost don’t get any trackback spam. From my akismet page:
    * Comments (2,592)
    * Pingback (31)
    * Trackback (1)
    They’re all comments.

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