Asymmetrical Information

You need to download MTClose2 from http://thedeadone.net/sw/000480.shtml and run it. It will close trackbacks on all yout old posts.

I did it a few weeks ago. Works great.

It's turned off at the moment. I'll see if I can figure out how to block this latest set.

By the way, don't panic if you see one or two come through, I'm testing the blocks.

Seems like a rough start to Valentine's Day...

It's just the spammer's way of saying 'will you be my Valentine'...

Nevermind Cupid, give me a good hunting bow and one of those spammers in my sights...

(No, I wouldn't shoot... but I'd sure enjoy watching them beg.)

Well, if you're hosted on a UNIX machine and know how to telnet in, you can turn off all the permissions of MT's trackback script. Go into the MT directory, and do a:

chmod 0 mt-tb.cgi

That second thing is a zero. This keeps anybody from running that script, effectively disabling trackbacks. When you want to turn it back on do:

chmod 755 mt-tb.cgi

Or, you can just enter:

mv mt-tb.cgi mt-tb.cgi.illremovethislater

Then, when later comes:

mv mt-tb.cgi.illremovethislater mt-tb.cgi

Or, you can login to MySQL (if you use that) and enter:

select distinct tbping_source_url from mt_tbping;

- to see a list of all the pings

delete from mt_tbping where tbping_source_url = 'http://spammername.com';

- replace spammer name with the bad URL; be very careful

delete from mt_tbping where LOCATE('spammername', tbping_source_url) > 0;

- replace spammer name with the bad URL; be very careful since this uses just part of the URL, not the whole URL

update mt_trackback set trackback_is_disabled = 1;

- untested, but might turn off trackbacks on all posts. Change the 1 to 0 to turn them back on.

Personally, as a reader I'd rather sort through a little trackback spam than not see people who are linking to you. But that's just me. Trackback is a pretty cool thing, and it'd be a shame to have to disable it.

As a blogger I hate any kind of spam, but if there's any spam I'm willing to tolerate, it's trackback spam.

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