Several people have e-mailed asking about trackbacks they sent to Wizbang being blocked or rejected. We are aware of the issue and have identified the likely cause of the problem. I suspect that the automatic throttling mechanism in the site software is cutting off access for legitimate trackbacks, based on volume of spam trackbacks that were caught and blocked today. This trackback spam attack is the same type we faced earlier this year. I’m fairly certain that it’s the same type of DDOS attack that brought down Protein Wisdom earlier this week. Since we’ve experienced one of these before, we have better banning defenses in place, and have not had any downtime.
Update: To give you a feel for the scope of the issue we’ve received over 2,800 junk trackbacks in a 24 hour period – all from different IP addresses.
Winds of Change seems to be suffering from some major trackback spam as well.
Winds of Change is also getting trackbacked hard…
It’s an MT blog. I don’t even bother trying to send trackbacks to MT blogs. Almost none accept them from WordPress.
Kev, please delete this after reading.
“Since we’ve experienced one of these before, we have better banning defenses in place, and have not had any downtime.”
This is not a good line to post for all eyes to see. There are nuts out here that take this as a personal challenge-believe me.
Rov
longtime reader/occational poster