I’ve figured out the main culprit in my site slowdowns, and his name is Spam. More precisely, trackback spam.
I have turned off trackbacks until the latest attack goes away.
I like trackbacks, though I don’t get a whole lot of legitimate ones, and they frankly don’t amount to a lot of extra traffic for me. So they’re really not worth the aggravation of the site slowdowns. I mistakenly attributed them to my hosting service. Nope.
It was spammers.
So if you want to link to me, you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way: Just link.
I turned mine off permanently and removed it from templates to reduce code.
Comment by Laurence Simon — 08/07/2006 @ 11:37 am
I see a trackback link next to Snoopy’s latest post. Are they still enabled on the other user accounts?
Comment by A Steve — 08/07/2006 @ 12:12 pm
Nope, it got in before I shut down trackbacks. The process doesn’t remove them, it just prevents them once it’s instituted.
Really filthy pr0n spam, too. Ugh.
Comment by Meryl Yourish — 08/07/2006 @ 12:17 pm
D’oh. Unfortunately, trackbacks are a source of traffic for the sender of trackbacks, not the recipient. I guess I’ll go back to the old method, of putting the backlink into comments….
Comment by Andy — 08/07/2006 @ 2:23 pm