One of my favorite aspects of Captain's Quarters is the trackbacks. I love the fact that the site can display all of the bloggers who have linked back to CQ in order to continue the debate. Readers can make quick jumps to read all of the arguments (and if they're using Firefox or the beta release of IE 7.0, they can open them up in tabs). I often browse through my trackbacks to see how others view my argument, and it makes me a better blogger.

What I don't like about trackbacks -- what I absolutely hate about them -- is the trackback spam I have to weed out. Movable Type 3.2 does almost all of the hard work for me by using a complicated algorithm to identify potential junk trackbacks. It catches valid ones a little too often, but I approve those and they eventually appear on the posts, but I can delete bogus pings in one shot this way.

All of this trackback spam comes from commercial sites that want to advertise without paying the website owner. In my book, that makes them unethical parasites -- and, oddly enough, most of it comes from on-line gambling sites. These are people who want customers to trust them to pay out winnings honestly, and attract them by cheating on their advertising. Why would anyone trust a gambling site that cheats in any aspect of its business? If they're scummy bastards in cheating website owners like myself out of advertising revenue, why would anyone expect them to be honest with payouts for winnings?

And what about giving them credit card information? These people steal advertising space on blogs. It wouldn't surprise me if they committed credit-card fraud and identity theft as well. Surely no one thinks that thieves get too particular about their victims or scams.

I've had to rename my scripts this evening and rebuild the files in order to end a deluge of this crap this evening. Hopefully, that will keep things running smooth for the next month or so. In the meantime, stay away from these online gambling sites for your own protection.

Rant mode OFF. [grrrr]

UPDATE, 10:22 PM CT: I can see from the server logs that Hosting Matters is getting hit by a huge number of spambots. They shouldn't affect CQ's status because of the script change I made earlier.

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