Dealing With Trackback Spam

With all the trackback spam I'm currently receiving, I've reworked the trackback code on this site again.

Each trackback is stored in a MySQL database, which I periodically clean out. This database tracks the senders IP address and if the trackback is shown or not, as well as the normal links and copy associated with a trackback.

The new code now looks at the incoming IP address and if it has more than 3 no show flags then it automatically treats the incoming trackback as spam instead of going off and doing more exhaustive checks.

This is working very successfully, and though I'm still getting several hundred spams a day, yesterday only 18 were from new IP addresses that aren't blacklisted, and they still didn't make it live as the trackback code detected they didn't link back to this site.

All trackbacks are emailed to me, along with their status, and GMail is doing a good job in grouping it all together for easy checking.

So far, it's got nothing wrong.