Move trackbacks to a plugin

[Viper007Bond]

This is kinda way out in left field, but what do you guys think about removing the whole trackback feature?

I think it's pretty safe to say that 99.9% (if not more) of trackbacks are spam. The average user has no idea about them (no one really uses them anymore as they require manual user input of a special trackback URL) and I think the general public would be better off without all the spam they cause, Akismet or not.

For the people that really, really want it, a plugin could be used.

Thoughts?

BTW, I wrote this plugin a while back for my own blog and it works great: ​http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-trackbacks/

Or, for people that really, really wanted to disable them, a plugin could be used.

I tend to get more spam comments and pingbacks. On the rare occasion that I do get a trackback, it's legitimate. Are there any stats that say 99.9% of trackbacks are spam?

Replying to greenshady:

Are there any stats that say 99.9% of trackbacks are spam?

Akismet can probably back me up on this, but I'll admit I pulled the number out of my ass.

Before I wrote and enabled my plugin, I was getting dozens of trackbacks a day I think. I got like 5 a year that were legit.

One month's stats for one of my blogs:

• 7.21% legitimate comments
• 194 comments
• 162 pingbacks
• 7 trackbacks

• 92.79% spam comments
• 4,490 spam comments
• 179 spam pingbacks
• 2 spam trackbacks

Trackbacks are obviously used far less but fair better in the legitimacy department than pingbacks and comments.

If I were to make an argument for removing trackbacks based on spam, I'd need to make that argument for comments and pingbacks as well, more so actually. While these results may differ from yours, I don't think spam should be the foundation of the argument to remove them.

I'm highly surprised you received legitimate trackbacks. I was getting tons and tons of spam ones (as unlike pingbacks, there's no verification, so spammers like them) but essentially no legit ones before I turned them off.

Same problem, too many trackback spam.

I think adding a checkbox to the options page (turn on/off trackbacks) will be an elegant sollution. For backwards compatibility trackback will be active for all.

Replying to ramiy:

I think adding a checkbox to the options page (turn on/off trackbacks) will be an elegant sollution. For backwards compatibility trackback will be active for all.

​http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-trackbacks/