I get a modest amount of traffic and am rarely linked by other blogs so trackbacks were pointless for me; if someone linked me and it drove any traffic my way I saw it in my stats anyway. I fail to see the benefit of trackbacks, for me at least. Not to sound ungrateful to a charming person who is at least partly responsible for the blogging software I use for free, but part of me thinks maybe Mena is a control freak and trackbacks sort of grew from that, the need for absolute control over the blog; you know, like, Who’s Linking Me? But the only ones I got were trackback spam, and I got hundreds so I went and stripped anything trackback related from all my blogs and guess what, I still get them from automatic programs spamming me. I have a couple MT links to check out, I’m sure there’s a solution for it, I am just too busy this week at work to spend any time doing it just yet, but I’ll fix it eventually. But my question is, do any of you see a point in trackbacks?
I just had to go read what a trackback is. To me, if it doesn’t exist in Blogger (Blogger = free, me = cheap), it doesn’t exist. Or maybe it does exist in Blogger but it never sounded very useful.
Anyway, now that you mention this Mena person, maybe I can reveal my theory: Ben and Mena are secretly siblings, which is why Barak Berkowitz is making a face here:
http://www.sixapart.com/about/management
I like them. I like to be able to leave trackbacks, especially as thex do continue the discussion. But they’re not essential.
From the outset I could not see any particular value to trackbacks, and largely I think that they failed on their own merit, even before they turned into the tool of spamdemons. I have never used them. We are well rid of them.
I don’t really understand them but then, I’ve made very little effort in figuring them out. I have them installed but only because they are built into the Expression Engine software. I’ve only had one trackback, ever. Yahoo.
I liked the idea of them, but have mostly failed to see any real benefit. I can think of once–in the middle of a webblogscandal (Plain Layne, I think) where I liked Trackbacks because I could better see what everyone was saying about a blogger I’d liked who apparently had never existed.
Anyway, it seems as though many people have ceased using them, either out of boredom, disinterest, or the spam. No loss, that I can tell.
I never did figure out what trackbacks did either. I sure hate that comment spam, I wrote my own blog code (I felt like I had to since I am a web developer) and I had to weed out a lot of likely words to cut it out.
Yes. Here’s a summary:
http://www.aardvark.at/blog/archives/2004/09/000710.html
Tricks to get rid of trackback spams:
1. Rename the file mt-trackback.cgi into something else and change the according pointer in mt.cfg
2. Upgrade to MT 2.661
3. Install MT-Blacklist
It is possible to get the situation under control that way.
Seemed an ego thing to me. I’ve never used them and when I got my first Trackback spam I immediately switched it all off. I don’t think I’ve ever had a design that incorporated the feature…