Everyone’s heard of comment spamming right? Its where spammers use bots to drop links to their sites in peoples blogs (and wiki’s, etc). Its a meathod to increase their popularity on Google. While Serendipity (the blog software I use) has built in protection for this, there’s the “trackback” feature. Now trackbacks are cool, but they have no protection (of course they can’t, but thats a different story). Its has come to my attention that spammers have figured out how to abuse trackbacks, to post links to their sites. This morning I stopped by to find that every single entry I had posted to date, had a trackback on it. Seeing is how no one cares what I write, that was odd. As the case was, every trackback was the same (at least the link, the text was random poetry) poker site, a site that didn’t even load.
Sadly, Serendipity doesn’t have an easy to use tool to remove them, so I had to go through every entry and delete the trackbacks by hand. If anyone happens to see any of these trackbacks left over, please let me know.