Lately I realized that I absolutely don't care any longer about trackbacks. At the beginning, it was fun to get a notice every time someone would link to my blog, and I would religiously check their site and probably discovered cool blogs this way. But now? While I value comments, I just don't see the point of trackbacks any more.
- I get too much of them to have the time to check them all
- They make ugly […]anchor links[…] in my comment moderation queue
- A third (on my blog at least) are spam (mostly caught by Akismet hopefully)
- And when they're not spam, 95% of the time they come from a website I can't understand because I don't speak that language
So, after several minutes of loud pondering, I've decided to simply turn them off on the whole site. For the record and if someone is wondering, besides turning the option off in Settings / Discussion, you need to send the following to MySQL:
- UPDATE `wp_posts` SET ping_status="closed";
Bye bye ping/track/whatever-backs!
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and it's a real comment. I will see with the time if fame, luxury cars, chicks and trackback come to me by millions, then I might disable it as well..
i see / understand your post about trackbacks and your decision, but it`s a pitty that it comes so far with trackbacks.. sry for my bad english ;)
Totally agree. And it was so neat idea… in theory!
It's a shame that now even trackbacks are part of a spammers arsenal, but totally understand that you have better things to then to delete "spambacks"(my spur of the moment word)
I completely disagree with the opinion that pingbacks are entirely useless and that they only clutter a comments section.
Only very minor tweaks to comments.php are required to separate pingbacks from comments, and to display pingbacks in a more user-friendly manner (such as a OL or UL that displays the blog name/post title, rather than contextual text inside of ellipses).
Pingbacks are an important part of the inter-connectivity of the blogosphere, as a means of linking to similar content. The idea of disabling them is currently fashionable, but it is also short-sighted.
Further, "spambacks" can be prevented at a near-perfect rate using a simple plugin.
Hi and thanks for this post.
Also I in two of my blogs, I decided to remove Trackbacks, just because I don't like to see them in my comment's list.
So I have a clear list of comments by my own visitors.
Thanks and Goodbye,
Alessandro Zamboni