For most of the day and part of the day yesterday the SpamLookup software I installed to combat trackback spam worked a little too well, blocking spam trackbacks and legitimate trackbacks. Ironically trackbacks were rejected from Six Apart’s own Typepad service.
While the SpamLookup software holds great promise, it’s not suitable for use here due to the aggressive trackback filtering employed. I can’t have legitimate trackbacks rejected, and I wasn’t getting the moderation notification (or even moderation without notification) I expected on the trackbacks The software has been removed and trackbacks should operate normally. Trackbacks to older Wizbang entries are still subject to moderation.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Feel free to resend the trackbacks…
Update: [4/19 12:30 pm] Some minor plug-in interactions were continuing to generate errors. Those are now fixed, and I’ve tested receiving trackbacks – it’s working fine.
Hmm…glad you shared this (I haven’t yet installed that upgrade but was hoping to soon); earlier, I never received either/or (1.) comments notices via emai (2.) moderation quee notifications for trackbacks/comments…then it began functioning properly without any changes in my settings.
I have no idea as to why but now I check both the site itself and don’t rely only on being notified via email about various. Usually MT functions quite well; sometimes time&running have to be allowed, in my experience, for the whole thing to work as intended.
The trackback spam is pretty badly intense.
I’m still trying to cleanup from SpamLookup. Weird errors in the activity logs about errors in other plugins…
WordPress 1.5.1 + Spam Karma 2 = more than 99.5% of spam blocked, with no false positives so far.
Michelle Malkin has been having troubles as well (running MT 2.661), so she had me turn of trackbacks for entries that are more than 2 days old. But there comes a point where the measures you have to take to block spam in MT start causing more inconvenience than they prevent.
You should be congratulated for running TB’s at all. Captain Ed, Malkin, Powerline, Ace, and a host of others have been asking serious questions about the use of TB’s.
I understand that when you have thousands of comments and TB’s that without agressive protection, you can be overwhelmed. I just hope that plug in designers can come up with good solutions quickly.
Trackbacks rock! And thanks for keeping them.
So that’s why I wasn’t able to do any trackbacks! Thanks for the head’s up.
I’ve had ok luck with SpamLookup so far.
One thing I did was block all trackbacks/comments with encoded entries, that helped a lot. That is, I blocked // in SpamLookup.
What sort of problems were you having? There’s a log for what SpamLookup has been doing.
I think its fair to note that SpamLookup is in beta, BTW.