I resisted turning them off for the longest time: nostalgia, I suppose. I’ve been doing this for a while, and they used to be useful. Now they’re just an avenue for spambots to flood my Pending comments queue. Turning off that feature cleaned up that queue immensely.
My apologies to the legitimate sites who link here: I can’t pick and choose who gets trackbacks.
Moe Lane
PS: Yeah, I actually am kind of annoyed about it. Spambots are the single most annoying thing about site moderation; I hate having to change my operating methodology in order to counter them. It’s like doing so concedes that they’ve won, somehow.
I’m not a Computer Science expert, but I think there are ways you can deal with those spambots without turning those features off.
–
Another possibility here is that these aren’t random hits and someone is deliberately targetting your site.
Nah, this is a 2K/day site. Anybody trying to target me here and not, say, over at RedState is just wasting his or her time.
If that is the case then you can probably ask Neil if he knows of any security updates to block out the spambots, since that’s more of his area of expertise than mine.