kasia in a nutshell

Trackbacks were dead the day a spammer first heard about them, which was the day after they were first announced. It was such a ludicrously stupid idea from the start and I'm surprised it took this long for people to realize it was going to be nothing but a spam magnet, much like unmoderated posting.

I'm pretty sure this is where I claim it's still worth it, and tool-a and technique-b, since I've been doing that since (with some expansion of the why-it's-dead) about 16 hours after it was introduced.

You know what? Bury it. Pingback's actually fairly nice, but I'm bored with defending TrackBack's worth. The main thing I think it's really valuable for, when you want to restart a conversation months later, got killed by people closing it before they even close comments, because they didn't have any better way of defending themselves, so it's mostly dead to me already. Finish it off, pull the plug.

(Or, if you really want to keep it, give me a shout: I had a total of zero TrackBack spams published when I was using MovableType, though I might have had a false positive or two along the way.)

“…and thank spammers for making yet another communication tool effectively useless”

“Another”? What was the first/previous one?

1. Email w/o heavy filtering is useless.
2. Usenet w/o a whole lot of spam cancelling is useless.
3. Blog comments w/o a whole lot of cleaning and filtering are useless..
4. A lot of search results bring up a whole lot of useless pages.
5. Most online forums no longer allow anonymous posting thanks (largely) to spammers. Trolls are easier to control when you don't have to deal with armies of spam at the same time.

That's five I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more.

None of the mentioned tools seem “effectively useless” to me; on the contrary, I use email, Usenet, blog comments and search engines daily and see very little spam in either. I never encrypt my email address; bogofilter, with no training on good and bad sets (only on my current email, and only on mistakes and unsures) stopped reporting false positives after two days, false negatives happen *very* seldom after two weeks, and I don’t see more than two-three unsures a day (I filter out 200 spams daily).

Of course the world would be nicer if the spammers were gone, but the flaw is in the naïveness of the five mentioned tools’ assumptions that they won’t be used for evil, and – to play a bit of a devil’s advocate – we wouldn’t be where we are if it weren’t for the dual human nature (including the Internet’s origins being a miliaty network).

I hate spammers, they are bad people, and it would be great if there were sane, legal ways of preventing them from spamming, but it’s not like the spam problem was nonexistent when TrackBack was created…

Since you didn't define "communication tool" very rigorously, one might also include telephone marketers (including politicians and surveys), or for that matter plain old junk mail.

I read something recently that trackback pings were getting totally out of hand. I would have forwarded you a link, but 19 times out of 20 you're ahead of me on the game, so I didn't bother. All I can do here is confirm that the whole internet is having this problem and most of us are just giving up on trackbacks.

I don't think I ever said spam didn't exist before trackback? I merely said that I'm giving up on it since I just don't have the time to bother with the filtering required to make it useful again. It's just not a worthwhile effort to me.

The reason why all those services are useful to you is because many people spent many hours making sure they remain useful.

‘I don’t think I ever said spam didn’t exist before trackback?’

No, but I think creating such a service in the post-spam days without any spam countermeasures was a design flaw.

‘The reason why all those services are useful to you is because many people spent many hours making sure they remain useful.’

Yes, and they are brilliant people, and I’m very thankful for their great work, and I’m sad that they couldn’t spent the time they spent creating spam filters on doing more interesting (and community-beneficial) things, although I do believe text classification science advanced at least a bit ‘thanks to’ spam filters development.

I guess I just wanted to say that I think part of the flaw is in the communication tools’ design, the underlying assumption that they won’t be misused, and that they are far from being ‘effectively useless’, at least for me.

Spam is a big problem (especially in the non-digital media mentioned by PM Paul – phone and snail mail), and the world would be a better place if it was gone, but we have to cope with what we’re being dealt, because the people won’t change.

Originally, blog comments and trackbacks weren't considered something spammers would be heavily interested in because nobody realy considered the google index factor.

Who could have predicted google would love blogs so much?

A couple spammy trackbacks a day are manageable.. more than a thousand are not (and that's the attempted quantity on my server in the last 24 hours). 1103 to be exact.