[pmwiki-users] Trackbacks

Russell Bailey russell-pmwiki at saberpunk.net
Tue Sep 20 20:55:09 CDT 2005


Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

>On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 11:01:15PM +0200, Sebastian Siedentopf wrote:
>  
>
>>   Am 20.09.2005 um 22:13 schrieb Patrick R. Michaud:
>>     Could someone give me a quick explanation of what a trackback is
>>     and how it works?  
>>   ...
>>   Suppose someone has a blog with an article A. I read it and write about
>>   this blog entry A in my blog. So I want refer to blog A and notify blog A
>>   that I'm writing about it. So my blog (entry B) sends a trackback ping
>>   back to blog A and says: here is a entry B that is related to your blog
>>   entry A. Blog A recognize it and shows a link to my related blog entry B
>>   on the original site.
>>    
>>
>
>Thanks, this gets me a little farther along.  
>
>When we say "send a trackback ping"...  is this something that the 
>blog software does automatically (when an article is posted,
>scan it for links to external sites and automatically ping them),
>or is it something that is manually initiated by a person...? 
>  
>
Someone may need to correct me, but I believe the blogger still 
generally copies the trackback url and pastes it into a form provided by 
their software.  Alternatively,  you can use a little bookmarklet to 
autodiscover the trackback url from a page's header.

So:

* When composing a post,  the user provides,  manually or by 
bookmarklet,  a trackback url.
* When the post is made available for public consumption,  the wiki/blog 
sends a request to the trackback url.

There is a standalone trackback implementation written in Perl,  which 
is pretty minimal and pretty functional.

>Also, does this mean that each page/article needs to be keeping
>track of any trackback pings it has received?  If so, then what's
>the standard mechanism for dealing with spammers who might
>use trackback pings to create lots of links to other sites...?
>  
>
 Trackback spam is a problem,  just like conventional comment or wiki 
spam.  You kill it in pretty much the same ways-  with link blacklists.




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