DrunkenBlog

Goodbye, TrackBack

In that not too distant future, TrackBack is going to be leaving the site. This really sucks, because I like trackback, or rather what it adds to the site. A lot of bigger sites turn it off, either because:

• Sites don't actually want you to leave them, they'd much rather you click and go to a different page on their site. Pushes up page views, and advertising, etc.

• Depending on the content, they'd prefer you to just accept what they're saying rather than read it and then see it get torn apart with opposing view.

If you've followed the site, you'd know I actually like opposing views, and really like when people flesh things out that I've only hit on in a cursory way, or even better, correct me. People do this all the time in the comments, and I'll often correct spelling errors that are pointed out or errors in my back-of-the-napkin math, and then I'm sure to leave the comments right where they are after it's been corrected.

I even leave in the embarrassing ones, because while it may hurt my pundit status, its good for people to remember I'm only a God on Wednesdays and could well be wrong the rest of the week when I'm forced to peddle bibles. Trackback was a favorite of mine, which is why I didn't shunt it over to a side of the page or at the end, it's right there above the comments (more on this later), but it's going to go away from the site, and this is why...

• TrackBack is already dying across the board. Others called this earlier than me, but I really wanted to give it a shot and wasn't ready to mentally declare it. Still, there is no way to get around it, it's in a major decline in usage and mindshare.

• The other day, I tried to delete a bunch of comment and trackback spam via MT-Blacklist, and started getting errors. After a few hours of making sure stuff was alright on my end, the solution was to delete a bunch of entries. Somewhere in there, MT-Blacklist was hitting the upper limits of what it was able to handle when I went much about 3,800 entries. I didn't spend enough time to figure out exactly what the problem was, but if it comes down to comments or pings, comments win.

• Something is going on with the frequency of trackback spam versus comment spam, I've seen a huge uptick in the ratio of spam versus ham, and many of them are based on domains it is incredibly annoying to deal with, like google.com or blogspot.com. I have no clue what the google one is about, but jesus, what asshats.

My big push over the last while has been trying to pare down what I do on the site in order to allow me to get more interviews and such out with the limited time I can devote to it, and it's just become too time intensive to keep it. I decided I'm going to keep comments no matter what (And, god-willing, anonymous comments), and the benefit versus time is just too expensive to keep both.

I did put the trackbacks over the comments for a reason, and preferred them over the comments for a reason. In a small way, trackback encouraged people to do their own site, because, well, they had to have one in order to trackback and have their stuff right there front and center and maybe get some hits from it.

The statistics I've heard say less than one in five people who read blogs actually have one, and it's probably less than that now, even as blogs grow. People will ask why I tell how I do things (The idea being that sites compete for readership and hits and dollars, with the idea being that by giving up my secrets I'm hurting the site in the future if they do content that competes with mine), but if you've read Rumble young man, rumble it shouldn't be surprising.

If someone likes what I do, in my ideal world, they might be inspired to try their hand or, in some cases, jump back into the saddle. It's a big web, and by more producing content it puts pressure on the 'established' media, as well as the sites that just really hardcore suck, to do better and create better content. I actually want more people doing this stuff, because I want to enjoy browsing through my feeds more.

That's just sort of my thing, because I'm in love with the web and content, and trackback helped that in a small way even if it wasn't its original intention, and it really sucks that a stupid virus rarely realizes its killing the host.

I'm sure I'll get pinged about a few of these here, as I've mentioned some of the problems I've had with spam before, and it isn't like there aren't alternatives to killing trackback, or perhaps using something to achieve the desire affect..

• Do xyz and cut your spam by...

  I'm so beyond this right now. The site runs in the red most months, and I'm fine with that, I'd be doing it anyways and the only thing cash helps is to make it all happen faster because I can devote more time to it. Right now, I have more opportunities to do cool things on the site (interviews, etc.) than I have time to do, and I'm trying really hard to minimize time spent on say, dealing with trackbacks, and instead devoting it elsewhere.

  My thing is, because of dwindling support for it, no matter what you do it'll be more of a burden than a benefit now. None of the 'solutions' out there are guaranteed to completely stop it, and none of the ones that were supposed to stop it have worked. I'll also admit I'm trying to make my MT install as stock as possible before the move to WordPress, simply because it's hacked up enough as is and I want to minimize the eventual trauma.

  And it would really just be a band-aid, because Trackback is already being wheeled towards the iron lung. They'll compensate towards people moving the default URLs from the stock install soon enough, and it'll be right back to where we were.

• Referrer logs...

  The idea behind this one is to just show how people are getting to the site in some way. Theoretically if someone is trackbacking, they're also linking, and once someone has visited from that site it should should up in the referrer logs. Ideally, someone reading one of my entries could see the list, and click and go to the other site.

  It's a nice thing to have, but unfortunately if you've looked at a referrer log lately, you'd know this was being killed via referrer spam before it even really got popular, and while there are solutions for filtering out those horrifying entries, I'm unwilling to dump the time into messing with them and even more unwilling to have readers seeing 'bestiality' and 'MILF' links all over when a few slip through.

• Tag it!

  Oh dear god is tagging hot right now, and oh dear god is it over-hyped and in some cases incredibly lame. Basically, tagging is keywords, and keywords are so 1995.

  Now, tagging can be cool, as in some situations it's really the only way to add context. If you look at say, your iPhoto library, only so much context is captured with a photograph. You can browse chronologically, but adding say, a 'smart search list' ala iTunes is impossible because there is nothing to really index, but with keywords you can add a 'flower' keyword to all your photos of flowers. Or the names of the people in the picture, etc.

  However, it's not ideal, it's just necessary because as it stands, our computers have an extremely limited ability to deal with that type of content. We've been here before, back in 1995, when everyone was adding keywords to their web sites so that spiders would be able to index them. Along came google, with the ability to index the content and allow you to search it, and keywords have all but evaporated.

  What makes del.icio.us cool isn't the keywords and tagging, although those can be nice in certain situations, it's the ability to share bookmarks and see what others are looking, all alone. Eventually, del.icio.us is going to start crawling and indexing your bookmarks, so you can search them by content ala google, and tagging will dry up.

  The idea now, like with say Technorati, is to add keywords or 'tags' to your entries to let the system. Technorati then aggregates them. So theoretically I could add "trackback" as a keyword to this entry, and someone at Technorati could click on that tag and see all the posts mentioning it, including this one, and see all the posts referencing mine. This is of course, assuming those sites are in the Technorati system (it's entirely hit-or-miss), and assuming of course I'd actually added that tag.

  If this sounds remarkably like the categories you see on the sidebar of the site, you're not stupid, it's very much like them and there is a reason why people start off categorizing everything and then eventually winding down. It takes a lot of work if you're going to be thorough, and once you miss a few, you're screwed, and just stop doing it altogether.

  I pretty much only do it in certain cases now because it's easier to say, show someone all the interviews or all the CherryOS or VX30 posts, but I'd be entering at least 10 keywords for this post and it just wouldn't happen. Oh, it would happen with some people, because they sort of get off on it, but they're the kind of people that walk around their house with a label maker.

  More power to them, nothing wrong with it, I'm just not one of those people and would wager the majority aren't either.

So, it won't be overnight, and nothing will happen to the existing TrackBacks, but fairly soon you'll stop seeing them on new posts. I really am sad to see TrackBack go, as I really thought it brought value. I'm even sorrier there isn't a credible alternative that wouldn't bring with it its own share of headaches, which would completely defeat the point of pulling the plug.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    July 25, 2005, at 05:43 PM