Hate seeing trackback spam intermingled with your blog’s comments?
It used to drive us nuts, too.
After some searching, we stumbled upon this great WordPress add-on: Simple Trackback Validation Plugin.
According to the plugin author, it performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks to stop trackback spam.
When a trackback is received, this plugin:
- Checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to. This reveals almost every spam trackback (more than 99%) since spammers do usually use bots which are not running on the machine of their customers.
- Retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the trackback. If the page doesn’t a link to your blog, the trackback is considered to be spam. Since most trackback spammers do not set up custom web pages linking to the blogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate trackbacks. Also, bloggers can be stopped abusing trackback by sending trackbacks with their blog software or webservices without having a link to the post.
There are several options available, including:
- Enabling logging to get all actions
- Selecting how to treat spam trackbacks (do not save in the database or mark as spam or place into moderation, and more)
It’s a great plugin because it makes for a cleaner, faster, better looking blog. We encourage you go try it today.