Turning off trackbacks/pingbacks...

I don't get a lot of legitimate trackbacks, but lately I'm getting an annoying amount of spambacks, so I'm turning them off for now. If you're one of the few kind folks who occasionally point my way (I'm looking at you, Open Source Community) :-), please consider a "manual" ping in comments.

On the other hand, I'm getting almost no comment spam, which I credit to the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin, previously mentioned in a post about my WordPress Plugin Binge last month.

Bad Behavior is another good tool and currently stops a couple of thousand access attempts per week. Akismet is super, but anything that it catches is something I then have to deal with. I'm not getting all that many spam trackbacks, but the ones I get are still a nuisance. (And several have slipped by Akismet.)

(I hear great things about Spam Karma, but so far I haven't felt the need to try it out.)

Credits

This is the second time I've used this cartoon from the April 2003 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. (This time I modified it more to my liking.) I still don't know who drew it and I'm still hoping this qualifies as fair use. I much prefer using my own work or the countless freely available images on the Internet for graphics on my posts, but this one just seems so perfect for spam-related entries.

This is the severity of what we're facing. I'll bet Spam is irritating the hell out of both Death and Taxes. Death probably wouldn't even have him. And if Taxes has his way, we'll all suffer even more when he starts taxing emails to try combating spam. A pox on all three of their houses.