Thread

I remember a few years back when blogging became a sensation of all the fuss with trackbacks. I used to think it was an essential part of blogging, but it seems many, many sites no longer even bother. I know the trend is to totally rule them out, but do any of you guys who run or have developed some medium to large-scale blogs incorporating them at all?

The last big blog I seem to remember using them is the TechCrunch network of sites. Other than that, I wouldn’t really be able to name you any others.

Take your pick. Could you mean the Updates Sites module? Apart from that, isn’t that built-in functionality of the CP?

Ingmar, I think the question isn’t whether or not EE support trackbacks (it does), but if anybody still accepts them. I don’t know a single site; while I still consider trackbacks to be a useful feature, it’s nevertheless going extinct because of spam.

Markus,

I’m assuming that they are pretty much dead as well. I personally don’t see much use of it if it is not widely adopted and the fact that many cram their trackbacks right into their comments section kind of hinders from what would be a normal, clean environment for topic discussion.

I just wanted to scope to see the general consensus on here on a more personal scale, but as I’ve read, it’s pretty much a widely viewed opinion by the industry that its the way of the dinosaur I suppose.

do any of you guys who run or have developed some medium to large-scale blogs incorporating them at all?

Years ago when my blog was about medium-scale (when the scale of the blogosphere was much smaller than now), I used trackbacks, but I’ve disabled the module because at the same time my blog has declined, trackback spam has skyrocketed—until it reached the point where about nine pings out of ten were spam.

I still try to send trackbacks if I’m linking a blog that still uses them, but that’s become less and less likely over… even just the past year or so, I guess.

I recently re-enabled them and haven’t actually received a trackback spam yet. That is a big decrease from the 100+ I used to get daily.

That said, I haven’t seen them active on any sites I read.

Wow. When even the spammers quit using a system, that sounds pretty “final.”

I always found them pretty useful, and still get legitimate trackbacks.

Maybe the spammers have moved onto the social media aggregators and microblogging systems as the new frontier…

“Scraper” blogs have become fairly commonplace, often turning up in searches before the original site from which they take the content.

When I look at all the stuff that the popular sites have to put up with, I look at my 100-150 visits a day and breathe a sigh of relief.