So I checked my e-mail this morning and I had nine notices of trackbacks. "Ooh... my site is catching on, look at this." Nope... TRACKBACK SPAM. The trackbacks were total gibberish. So I added them to my blocked list and then deleted them.
Here's a question. I labeled them all "trackback spam" and then put them on my blocked list, but does any other user of Typepad benefit from that? I'm sure I wasn't the only one trackback spammed last night from those addresses and I'm sure most users will block the address after they clean their site. Why shouldn't we collectively benefit from all that labeling? SixApart should partner with Cloudmark, which has this "community" concept to help block e-mail spam, to offer some kind of trackback screen. If enough Typepad/MT users block an IP address and call it spam for trackbacks, every other user who signs up would get the benefit of that block. I'd pay for that in a second, because if this trackback spam gets as bad as e-mail spam got at its peak, I'd probably quit blogging.
Martin at Ignition had a similar problem on MT, but admittedly, the volumes of spam he got were much worse. His comments were on point, though. Even though I only had nine, it was way too cumbersome to delete, label, and block these goofballs. I'm surprised he didn't mention a possible Cloudmark solution, since Cloudmark is Ignition's company.