They’ve tried my patience before, but I’m finally switching off TrackBacks on all my weblogs. Including the Encyclopedia section of Pepys’ Diary which relied on them for listing the dates when a person or place or thing was mentioned in the diary. I’ll now have to write a script to laboriously extract links from diary entries and insert the appropriate TrackBacks into the Movable Type database.
The final straw? My web hosting company, Pair.com, disabled mt-tb.cgi, the TrackBack script, because it had received 24,144 requests over about an hour taking the server load to nearly 211 (which, apparently, is very high), “deeming it inaccessible to other users”.
I don’t know how much more than a usual amount of requests this was. I don’t know if it was an over-enthusiastic spammer, or if it was some kind of denial-of-service attack… But I’ve now more than spent the quota of my life that should be devoted to thinking about the annoyance of TrackBacks. Unfortunately the trouble they allow to happen vastly outweighs their benefit.
So goodbye TrackBacks.
Comments
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Bozo at 17 Mar 2006, 11:36am. Permalink
Yup, I had a call from my server centre yesterday as well. In the end I had to delete the mt-tb.cgi file :-(
I love using trackback to get conversations started. I've toyed with the idea of saying goodbye but keep trying to make it work. My next trick is going to be a cron process that renames the file daily. Of course that's a bit pointless as well as the filename is exposed in the page source *sigh*
:-)
D