Free WP Plugin Idea: Use Referrers Instead of Trackbacks

Blogs have a way of keeping track of who is linking to them using trackbacks or pingbacks. It’s a good idea in theory because it helps you follow the discussion as it spreads to new areas, but in practice it is mostly filled with spam because getting a well-placed trackback on a popular website can be a good source of traffic.

Instead of using trackbacks, why not use referrers?

Using Comment Spam to Measure Blog Rank

Using the Technorati Rank as a measure of blogging hierarchy is so 2005. Deciding if a blog is part of the top 100 purely by the number of other blogs linking to it is one way to measure popularity, but there must be other ways. In nature you can track the population increases of Bambi, [...]

Too Much Spam - Blacklisting .info because it gets through Akismet

The .info domain was created in late 2000 / early 2001. Since then it has been very popular with over 3 million registered sites. Most of those sites are used for “independent businesses” aka spam. It really should have been called .spam to do everyone a favour.
Someone has recently realized how Akismet works and been [...]

Too much Spam - Akismet Auntie Spam for WordPress.com (Greasemonkey Script)

I don’t know about you but my Akismet spam folder on my WordPress.com is filled to the brim (56 pages deep, which is ridiculous if you consider that anything older than 15 days is automatically deleted). It’s considered good form to take a peek to make sure that no one’s comments are being accidently deleted, [...]

The Stupidest Comment Spammer I Ever Did See (Dirk Wagner, team4success.biz and PR Backlinks Generator)

Hi Dirk,
Thanks for the false identity cut-and-paste comment. I don’t get enough of those in one day.
Let me get this right, you’re trying to sell me blog spamming software by spamming my blog? Just a thought — you might be targeting the wrong audience. Instead of marketing to people who want your software you [...]

Just say no to SEO contests like “Shaastra Thamesportal Zalecenia Autophytes Invernesshire”

These things are such plagues on the Internet. “Shaastra Thamesportal Zalecenia Autophytes Invernesshire” is one of those stupid Google SEO contests. But they aren’t really a problem if it wasn’t for people who go around spamming blogs in order to try and win it.
Why this doesn’t work

Spamming blogs is against the contest rules.
Whenever you leave [...]

Bitacle emphasizes the problem with RSS

RSS makes it easy to collect or aggregate feeds (getting information from several sources and displaying them as a unified whole). Take a look at TechMeme that gets the latest stories from top tech bloggers or PopUrls that displays the most popular results from social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious and Reddit. This is the future, and it’s pretty dang cool.

Where it falls down is crap sites like Bitacle who use RSS to steal content from others and present it as their own, all the while collecting ad revenue for displaying it.

Uniqcount.net wants to give you a virus

I found this in the Comments Box this morning:
A new comment on the post #52 “Peter’s New Jobs and BrainHunter” is waiting for your approval
Author : Rob Palmer (IP: 124.184.27.34 , CPE-124-184-27-34.nsw.bigpond.net.au)
E-mail : rob@freelanceworkexchange.com
URL : http://www.freelanceworkexchange.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=124.184.27.34
Comment:
That sounds like a pretty neat system - great to be able to find [...]

New spammer getting through Akismet

There’s a new spammer running off of 83.19.48.78, bzs78.internetdsl.tpnet.pl who has come up with a method for getting passed the Akismet spam filters. It looks like he’s registered a bunch of crap domains in the .at space. He’s made sure to only have one link per comment.
Author : sjytuyioiu (IP: 83.19.48.78 , bzs78.internetdsl.tpnet.pl)
E-mail : sjytuyioiu@yahoo.com
URI [...]

WordPress Website’s Search Engine Spam // waxy.org

This is very, very old news but I wasn’t using WordPress when it happened so I find it interesting there is this black eye on what I otherwise find to be absolutely the push-button content publishing software out there. It seems that at some point WordPress had teamed up with a start up to take [...]

Akismet at work on spam comments (damned sploggers)

WordPress.com comes with a default spam comment protection system called “Akismet“. It’s really good for catching comment spam. It works by a collaborative effort of where if one person marks it as spam then it is caught for everyone (okay, this is a bit of a simplification). Sure, they can mass post comments but since [...]