In my continuing rant on TypePad’s horrifically poor system for managing comment and trackback spam, I wanted to post the following complaint:

Why is it that we are unable to ban trackbacks based on a specific IP address the same way we can with comments? Why is it that when viewing trackbacks through the TypePad Control Panel, we cannot even see the IP address of the offending spammer? I know TypePad has this information because every time it sends me an email letting me know about a new trackback that has been submitted, it includes the IP address that the TrackBack was sent from.

So what gives? Here I am manually deleting tons of spam from the same bunch of jerks, all because TypePad hasn’t implemented a simple ban trackbacks based on IP option?

(And all of you spammers - don’t bother. All you’re doing is aggravating the crap out of me, but your comment and trackback spam will never see the light of day on my blog. Everything is moderated - do you see any spam on here? No. SO LEAVE ME ALONE!!!)

That’s it – I’ve had it! Even though SixApart introduced comment and trackback moderation for TypePad, it still does not diminish the termendous amount of work I stilll need to do sorting through legitmate trackbacks amongst the hoards of trackback spam. Effective immediately, I am now turning off trackback functionality on all of my TypePad blogs and you can thank the spammers for it.

This brings TypePad’s usefulness as a blogging platform down for me, as I consider TrackBacks to be an critical feature of blogging and connecting the strands of the blogosphere.

As I’ve mentioned before, handling trackback and comment spam is where WordPress really blows the competition away. WordPress is smarter than TypePad in recognizing spam and filtering it into a seperate queue for moderation, where I can scan through the hoard and do a ‘mark all as spam’ and get back to what I was doing. It’s almost effortless.

Six Apart – where are your spam filtering tools? You guys can do better than this. Until TypePad can recognize that trackbacks that talk about donkey sex, incest, child porn, and rape are pretty darn likely to be SPAM and put it in a seperate area labeling it as such, I must turn off my TrackBacks on TypePad. And that’s a shame for both me and the blogging community. Oh and while I’m griping, I’ll now add that I just realized that TypePad’s Configure tab only gives me the option of turning off trackbacks for new posts. I now ALSO have to manually go through each and every post I ever created and edit the post, and then uncheck the checkbox that says ‘Accept TrackBacks’. There is no tool for mass editing acceptance of TrackBacks on older posts. Shoot me now.

For those who are still wondering, I’m still torn between whether I prefer TypePad over WordPress, and when time permits intend to write a comprehensive comparison of the two (each has it’s own pros and cons, and is better or less suited for certain tasks/people), although WP is leaping ahead now that the TrackBack spam has become such an enormous problem in TypePad, despite the addition of new comment and trackback management tools…

Once you have a blog that gets any amount of traffic, you will eventually get bombarded by TrackBack spammers (people who send a fake trackback ping to your blog to try to increase links in to their site when their website doesn’t even mention your post, your blog, or anything to do with the subject).

Over the past few days, some jerk has gone wild with sending hundreds of trackback spams of a really offensive nature to all of my TypePad blogs - and while I once posted an article (now updated) on how well TypePad handles TrackBack spam, that’s *definately* no longer the case.

I have to say that it’s been a royal pain going through and deleting all of the trackback spam in TypePad. The spammer is using a proxy system such that their IP address is different for every TrackBack, so I can’t block them by IP address. And sadly, that’s the only method TypePad gives you for prevention of TrackBack spam - this is an area where WordPress blows TypePad away.

In TypePad, I’ve had to manually go and read through the list of trackbacks and check each one that is spam and then click the ‘Delete’ button, and I can only do this 20 trackbacks at a time, so I have to go through several pages (this jerk is sending them every few minutes - and whoever you are you are wasting your time as well as mine, because I’m deleting them almost as fast as you can post them - I monitor my TrackBacks very closely, so do us both a favor and just stop it already!!!)

WordPress handles TrackBack spam MUCH better. Almost none of it gets published to my blog - instead it is put in a moderation queue where I can click a button to say ‘Mark all as spam’ and then one click deletes them all. In order to get TrackBack spam to not be automatically published to your blog in WP, click on Options and then click Discussions. Where it says Comment Moderation, use the default of ‘Hold a comment in the moderation queue if contains more than 2 links’. Next click the link that says ‘Common spam words‘, which will take you to the WordPress Codex (online manual maintained by the WP community) where you can copy and paste the spammy words into the edit box ‘ When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URI, e-mail, or IP, hold it in the moderation queue’. And if you want, you can even add certain terms, IP address, URLs, etc into a blacklist area where you’ll never even have to deal with the spam.

Hey, SixApart - how hard would it be to implement a ‘hold comment/trackback for moderation if it contains any of the following keywords or x or more links’ feature in TypePad?? Because as much as I love TypePad (I’m still torn between TypePad and WordPress as my blogging platform of choice - they’ve got different pros and cons which I’ll write up in a future), I am sick of spending a portion of every day sorting through and deleting trackback spam!

Update: TypePad now gives you the ability to have all comments and
trackbacks be put in a moderation queue, requiring your approval before
any comments or trackbacks appear on your blog. Thanks to the horrific
nature of what these fools have been trackback spamming me, I’ve
turned Commend and Trackback Moderation ON so stop spamming me because
it will NEVER appear on my blog now. This doesn’t mean I’ve changed my opinion of WP being better than TypePad about handling comment and trackback spam — it’s still the hands-down winner for being able to recognize spam on it’s own and put ONLY that in the moderation queue, while allowing real comments and trackbacks to appear instantly. With TypePad, I’ve got to be regularly monitoring my comments and trackbacks and either approving or deleting them constantly, so it’s still a hassle.

Creating Static Pages using WordPress

WordPress creates dynamic pages on the fly, using PHP, which means that it takes a WHOLE lot less time to publish your pages/site with WordPress than it does with MovableType. However, some have said that the dynamic pages create an additional load on the server (hey, but so does the process of publishing using MT), and others want static pages as they are more easily cached. According to Jeff Minard, a plugin for WordPress called ‘WP-Statictize’, will make ‘WP will create static versions of pages on the fly and essentially act like MT by creating static pages, just in a slightly different (note: better ) way.’

Fighting comment and TrackBack spam with a WordPress Plugin

Craig from nuclear moose candy said, ‘If you use WordPess in combination with Kitten’s Spam tool plugins, you get fantastic comment spam moderation. I can delete a comment, flag it as spam, add the IP, email address, and some keywords to the spam words list with a single click of the button. The tool is intelligent enough to delete duplicates from the spam words list, as well. Additionally, Kitten created a ‘retrospaminator’ which will go back through all of you old comments looking for any you may have missed.

Note - his site has a lot of great WordPress tips on it which I’m gonna go check out right now!