WordPress Trackback Spam

By | January 7, 2005

If it’s not one kind of spam, it’s another. A mouth breather recently figured out to spam WordPress-powered blogs via the trackback mechanism. The first spam trackback I got was a bunch of pseudo-random letters. The next ten or so were nasty porn spam. I had to temporarily rename the trackback script to stop the vermin.

If you don’t care about trackback, the easiest way to stop the spam is to delete wp-trackback.php or to rename it. Alternatively, you can moderate trackbacks using a hack posted at WordPress.org.

If I start getting a lot of moderation emails, though, I’m going to hack the scripts using the same technique that allows comments to work with a script file with a non-default name. So far, that technique has worked perfectly for me with respect to preventing spam comments.

Update: Perhaps I did something wrong, because trackbacks aren’t being moderated. So, I’ve reverted to disabling trackbacks all together. Of course, since I got 115 spam trackbacks in less than 24 hours, moderation wouldn’t have been a great solution, either.

3 thoughts on “WordPress Trackback Spam

  1. Richard Berger

    Great – just when I come to your blog to learn how to use trackbacks, I find that you have disabled them 🙂 :).

    Enjoy,
    RB

    Reply
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