I do like the trackback functionality very much, but no chance, so I tell a similar story to others in the group.
In my case comments still are manageble - trackbacks not.
On my blog (now on Drupal 5.2) I do allow anonymous commenting but had to stop trackbacks.
The spam module is really very good in identifying spam und unpublishing it, that is the good side. I configured comments to have preview mandatory, there the remaining spam is managable for now.
Trackbacks are also unpublished very sucessful, but that does no longer help. The last weeks there were several waves of spam trackback requests on my site, often peaking with 10 trackback posts per second.
I guess it was a mistake to let the trackbacks enabled for all articles idependent of age (now >1500 nodes in about 2.5 years).
I use cheap shared hosting for normally low trafik sites (the peak IP by far recorded by Drupal log stems from google).
The processing of the trackback request up to unpublishing quickly overloads the server, the provider repeatedly had to shut down the site. :-(
At first I hoped to have a chance by "tuning the spam processing" in Drupal. E.g. an IP recognized 2 times as spam gets an "403" following, but that is still not fast enough (even if this prevents storing the spam in the db).
There is too much processing piling up to block the server.
The blackhole-module is indeed helping to let a server survive (thanks a lot for that) - but then without using trackbacks any longer at all. That is the situation for now with my site.
Of course, any help needs to be as efficient as the blackhole module. I am curious if sometimes an efficient filtering can be found fast enough to fight spam overload on a small server and still allows to use the trackback function.
Another point: The trackback protocol is quite young. If it would be possible to design a new protocol, which is designed with spam prevention from the beginning with much less load on the servers, this could fast replace the old one ... only dreaming ...
--- Franz
Comments
Give up on trackbacks?
Do you still get any legitimate trackbacks? I turned them off on all my sites about two years ago and haven't looked back since. If you really want some kind of trackback functionality, I'd look into Technorati integration.
Incidentally, you could probably block trackbacks with mod_rewrite at the Apache level so that the hits aren't much of a drain on resources.