IBBoard

What do trackbacks/pingbacks do? does it cost you anything in processing/bandwidth? are they marking useful things? maybe they're valid

I was actually going to delete this and forgot, but now that you've commented on it, never mind :D

Trackbacks are for when you reference a post in someone elses Blog. So taking examples from Ben's blog (one of the lads who I worked with last year), he sometimes puts some comments in his blog about Firefox development. Since the Firefox team have their own blog, he can "trackback" to them by putting their trackback URL into a section of his blog post and it'll put a message up on their blog saying "trackback from blog.ben-ward.co.uk" and then giving a snippet of what he said that was related to that blog post.

Unfortunately, much like you get Guestbook spam, Poker sites (possibly, I didn't check the actual sites to see if they matched what they were advertising) are faking Trackbacks to get links to their site to up page rank. I've put in some custom filtering now, so hopefully I shouldn't get hit again too often (about 10-12 over the weekend so far! All deleted as soon as I knew about them). Also, the fact that they encoded some of the letters of the "poker" and other words in the message gave it away as junk.

So it costs a little in processing, a tiny amount of bandwidth, is normally for marking useful things (marking that you've referenced it) but in this case was used for advertising/page rank boosts.

As for Pingbacks - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback. I just looked it up because I didn't know the real difference :D

Hmmmmmmmm, I just got another dozen last night - obviously my quick-fix filter was quick but not a fix :\ I'll have to investigate more as to how it works.

I've put in some better filtering now, and hopefuly it should stop future spam (or make it easier to block once it starts) but as of yet no attempts have been made to re-spam. It's a good things, I guess :)