WordPress and trackback spam

Most people who read blogs regularly will have noticed that trackback is on the decline. An increasing number of MT sites which used trackback have shut the facility off. Blog House, which hosts one of the blogs I read fairly regularly, now advises its readers:

Quick fix for trackback spam on WP. Rename your wp-trackback.php to something like wp-trackback.php.txt so they can’t find it, and so it won’t run even if they do.

This really is not necessary! Unlike in Movable Type, Trackbacks in WP are subject to moderation, as are comments. WordPress has a level of comment filtering which far surpasses what MT currently offers.

WordPress (I’m talking about v1.5 here) offers a two-level comment screening, so that you can specify words which, if they occur in the comment body, the poster’s name, URL or IP address, will cause the comment to be held in a moderation queue. The second tier is a blacklist, so that any comments with certain specified words will be canned before they reach the blog owner. I have four words in that list currently, all of them related to a form of gambling named after GW Bush’s home state (and I don’t mean Connecticut).

You can find the current list of common spam words on the WordPress Codex here.

Trackback is a useful and valuable part of blogging; it would be a real shame if the blog community abandoned it under pressure from spammers.