Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
As you can see, I’m still getting pingbacks, even with removing the link to the pingback server from my page header. The reason for this, most likely, is because in the WordPress code somewhere, my site is responding affirmatively to an XML-RPC request, and the pingback is then sent. I’ve since moved the xmlrpc.php file elsewhere, though this means I can’t remotely post for now. But I rarely do anyway.
The pingbacks are from a post that Jonathon Delacour wrote on the recent trackback and nofollow issues, over at Writable Web, the new weblog he’s writing in conjuction with Marius Coomans. In this writing, Jonathon provides a nicely done comparison of pingbacks and trackbacks and how the two have become somewhat synonymous in most webloggers minds, primarily because of trackback autodiscovery. He also covers the new nofollow attribute, automatic addition of in weblog tools such as TypePad has led the spammers this last week to basically hit webloggers across the nose with a rolled up newspaper, going “Bad, webloggers. Bad.”
In the meantime, here’s a surefire method of preventing comment spam:
Open up robots.txt, or create one, and add the following two lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
It could take a couple of months, but eventually you’ll find you’ll have no more comment spam. Of course, you’ll have no Google or other search engine pagerank, either. But why bleed pagerank out of the weblogs slowly with nofollow, when we can do it quickly with robots.txt?
Seriously, bite the bullet, cut the cord, and be comment spam free. Isn’t this what everyone wants?