Normally I get two or three instances of trackback spam per day here. So far just today I’ve gotten about 300. I’m not the only one; chatter on the WordPress support forum and Technorati seems to indicate there’s a huge wave of it across the blogosphere.
Until yesterday I just avoided the problem by moderating all pingbacks and trackbacks. But I got so tired of having to run my eyes over all of it that I just activated the Akismet plugin. It works so well that I’ve stopped using a captcha for comments, letting Akismet handle that too. (By the way, the captcha has been almost completely effective for me–the only spam in the last year came from a couple of human spammers).
So, bravo to Automattic, the folks behind Akismet.
UPDATE May 22, 2006 Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet statistics confirm that my experience isn’t unique: blog spam (as opposed to legitimate comments, or “ham”) seems to be increasing exponentially.
2 Comments
That’s funny, because SpamKarma had been nabbing on the order of 800-1000 per day for me, but lately it’s been more like 20 per day. Wonder how that works…
omg! this is kinda scary. especially if that certain trackback from that site is more than a spammy site–it’s a trojan laden site.
i can concur with that. though, it’s only once that a spammy site trackbacked my entry about coffee on my personal blog. i also saw the trackback on technorati.