Seeing
Davey's missery, and
Sebastian's / Kristian's fixes to Serendipity to stop trackback spamming. I struck me that perhaps trackbacks combined with blog spammers are always going to be a disaster waiting to happen.
The concept is quite nice, being able to see related articles, when reading a blog, but the trackback concept is a little too trusting, unless you want to go in and moderate trackbacks.
It inspired me however to hack up a smart referer log for my blog entries. (visit the site to find out more..)
Referers suffer the same problem that trackbacks do, spammers love sticking their url in the referer of their spambots, and end up making your nice referer statistics useless. Along with helping their search rating if you happen to render them to the web page.
So I hacked up a little code last night to my blog entries that logs referrers (into a hacked version of serendipities referrer table). And rather than just outputting it, it verifies that the page does actually refer to me.
In principle, it should check withing the first hour to see if it does. If it finds my url on that web page, it flags it as confirmed, then 30 days later it will check again.
If the page doesnt contain my url, it will check rougly once a day for 10 days, then delete the referer (meanwhile it never appears on the page.)
It also emails me if the referer is confirmed. (which caused a bit of a problem last night as I forgot to check the hacked referrer schema and ended up emailing myself 5000 notifications of the same link.)
Anyway it's up and going now - under "Mentioned by" at the bottom of each entry, quite interesting to see what google sends my way.
It also made me realize I'll have to start using the extended body, to actually see where I'm getting readers from, otherwise most people read the whole thing on the aggregators.
