I’ve had refbacks on the brain for the past couple of months after having read Why Refback Still Matters, so I figured since I’ve already got the pingbacks, trackbacks, and webmentions enabled, what’s one more way to communicate with my website from the outside? So as of this evening, just for fun, I’m now accepting refbacks too.
Besides earlier this week I joined my first webring in over a decade as well. It can’t be any more embarrassing to support old web tech can it? #everythingoldisnewagain
So the linkspammers have stopped using that mechanism? I think I disabled that in ’04 or so because they were generating dummy pages with the referrer spam…
I suspect that spammers are spending more time focusing on other surfaces now, besides anti-spam measures have come a bit further in almost 15 years. We’ll see what happens. I know some who are working on the vouch spec, which I suspect will cut way back on this issue as well.
Syndicated copies:
Yeah, I think this attack surface disappeared for a while. Right now I’m using inbound links from sites in my RSS reader OPML.
If I check my server logs for the referers it’s is still mostly spam. Especially the endless list of spam Gravatar profile links jumps out (about 1000 since midnight alone).
Chris Aldrich started accepting Refbacks after reading Why refbacks still matter by Gokberk Yaltirakli. Referer spam is however still very much alive. When I read Gokberk’s post, I looked at my server logs: the referrer log is still all about pills etc. Thousands of spammy Gravatar profiles jump out.
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