Year of the Code Monkey
Because Jonah Bishop Said So
I have disabled trackbacks at this site, due to a spammer grabbing content from my RSS feed and inserting it in his splog. Thankfully, only a summary of each post appears in my site’s RSS feed, so all the content he grabs from me is just a short sentence or two. I’m also blocking his IP address, so maybe I can put a stop to this nonsense.
March 1, 2007 at 9:47 am
I see how you combatted it, how’d you figure it out? AWStats? Analog? google and find your stuff somewhere? or did WP somehow notify you via the dashboard?
March 1, 2007 at 11:33 am
I periodically check to see what new comments have been posted here on the site, mainly by checking the front page and seeing if the comment count has gone up for a particular story (logging in is another method to see what new comments exist). Several recent stories had trackback comments, so I clicked the author’s URL that he so generously provided to view his site. After all, I want to see what people are saying about my posts.
One visit to his site made it clear that he was simply copying content from my RSS feed. He would have a post on his blog, with the same exact title as one of my posts, and with the same exact content as the post’s excerpt (which only appears in my RSS feed). I found his IP address via Spam Karma 2 (a WordPress plugin I cannot recommend highly enough), and blocked it with .htaccess. I decided to turn off trackbacks for the time being, though I may turn them back on now that he is blocked at the IP address level. However, I find that few people make trackbacks to this site, so turning it off doesn’t lose much.