I hit a wall yesterday.  I've spend the last week or so visiting my key blogs and cleaning out trackback spam.  Visiting several times a day.  I already wrote a bit about this— Will blog spam cool blogging's fire—and will post a podcast later today on this too.  Bottom line, on this blog, my blog, and our investor blog, I've turned trackbacks off for all new posts.  Old posts, well there are too many to go back and re-edit them, but I hope this helps.

 

So, why did I do this?  Porn.  Nearly all the recent comments and trackbacks have been porn.  And regardless of one's personal, private feelings on the issue, those aren't trackbacks and comments I want on my blogs for visitors and potential investors in Qumana to see.  As a group at Qumana we discussed this and decided that although we think trackbacks are very important to the Blogosphere, we just can't stomach it anymore.

 

Yeah, this isn't good.  No, this doesn't bode well.  Part of the issue is Blogware.  While I receive an e-mail for every comment, so comment spam gets deleted right away, trackbacks I don't learn about until I check the admin control panel.  I'm sure that Blogware is aware of this issue.  I'm sure it's a huge infrastructure issue for them.  I'm sure Typepad is in the same boat.  This is the double-edged sword of blogging hitting the mainstream.  Not that blogs are hot, spammers know that it will be profitable to comment, referrer, and trackback spam us.  Someone will click.  Some search engine will index them.  They will meet their goals.

 

So for now, I'm going to rely on Technorati, PubSub, Feedster, and IceRocket to find out if you've linked to me.  So make sure you're indexed!

 

Technorati Tags : trackback+spam, comment+spam, blog+spam, slog, spam+blogs