Moderate Trackbacks by MtDew

Trackbacks are a great feature of blogging - When someone references your post it sends your system a ‘trackback’ comment as an acknowledgement so you and others know that you are being written about.

Spammers have taken advantage of this by sending spam trackbacks with links to their nefarious sites. Why would they do this? Not to actually get you to click on their name (where the link is put) but simply to get links to their sites from as many other sites as possible. They have bots that scour the search engines in search of new blog postings that they can send a ‘trackback’ to. This pollution builds up their rating in the search engines.

Currently I run a plugin to WordPress called Bad Behavior that does a good job of keeping these bots off the system entirely. (You can see how many attempts it has blocked in the tag bar at the bottom of every page). But some spam trackbacks still make it through. I just installed a new little plugin that will hopefully kill this problem. It is called Moderate Trackbacks and it simply puts all trackbacks into the moderation cue and they will not appear in the comment section unless I approve them. I cross my fingers that this will fix the problem… Hopefully you will never notice another spam trackback again :)