Goodbye, Trackbacks

So while I am able to write a post now, the problem of the mysterious core dumps is still apparently not solved. I logged into my account last night to find that I had a nice 2 gb of core dumps in my movable type directory. These files must have accumulated during the past few weeks, and it’s obvious that my original posting problem wasn’t the only malfunction that was creating core dumps. In any case, I checked the system again tonight and found about 600 mb of files in my account. Great. At least that narrows it down a little, as I haven’t logged in to MT since last night. So if it’s not something I’m doing in MT, it’s got to be something that is accessible to everyone, like comments or trackbacks. After some halfassed troubleshooting, I was able to cause a core dump by sending a legitimate trackback to my site. Somehow I doubt that’s the only thing causing a problem, but clearly, it needs to go.

Trackbacks were a nice idea, but in reality, they’ve gone down as something of a debacle. The general concept is to provide a way for one blogger to notify another blogger when they’ve linked to their blog. So I write a post that links to another blog, and I can “ping” that blog to let the author of that blog know that I’ve linked to them. In addition, a link back to my post appears on their post. Sounds nice, right? And it is… when it works. The problem is that the system is completely open, so the spammers had a field day. And the trackback management functionality (including anti-spam measures) has always lagged behind comment functionality, so there always seemed to be problems. In other words, trackbacks basically became useless, and a maintenance nightmare. Also, the implementations of the trackback protocol on different blogging engines tended to be a bit strange (WordPress blogs can never seem to ping my blog successfully.)

The general concept still exists in other forms. Aggregators like Technorati are partially driven by Pings. They deal with spam too (among other issues), but again, the concept remains valid. Six Apart and others are attempting to rework the concept, at which point it might prove useful again.

Alas, it will not exist on this blog anymore. Of course it’s not a big loss. During the 8 year tenure of this blog, I’ve received exactly 11 legitimate trackbacks. I have no idea how many spam trackbacks I’ve received, but it’s somewhere around way too fucking many.

All of which is to say that I’m mucking around with my blog’s templates, so things might appear wonky for a bit. If you’re having problems, feel free to email me (or post a comment, as that seems to work fine).

Update: Author comments. It’s funny, I really should have removed trackbacks a long time ago. I guess I’m just lazy. Let’s just call it blog template inertia. Oh, and there was also at least 2 occasions where I thought to myself, I should remove trackbacks! They’re useless!, at which point I would receive a few trackbacks in the next couple days. But the last one was well over a year, and the core dumps provided a convenient excuse. Incidentally, only 160 mb of core dumps in the past day since I removed trackbacks. Hurm.