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Hacking Hackers on Moveable Type
In all the years I've been blogging I have not seen a single useful "trackback ping". Ever. In beginning to see them being exploited by spammers the feature seems almost to have been invented for that sole purpose.
One of my blogs started with an early version of Moveable Type and was upgraded over time. Somewhere along the line most of the entries were tagged to allow trackback pings. The spam started rolling in, gaining in volume and peaking at almost 100 per day. There was no way to batch change ALL entries to have trackbacks turned off from within the Moveable Type interface -- only batch DELETE the ones you didn't want to keep. (Which are all of them, really)
Was I doomed to have my site slowly crumble under the weight of texas holdem, porn, and weight loss ads? I thought not.
Using phpMyAdmin I:
- navigated to my blog's database
- selected the table "mt_entry"
- typed in: UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_allow_pings=0
...and hit Go
All entries were now marked as DISALLOW pings. Opening individual entries in the MT interface confirmed it -- the "Accept TrackBack Pings" was unchecked.
Later that day, another 100 trackback pings appeared in my inbox.
So something didn't translate -- I logged back in and did a "rebuild site" -- all files, just in case the change needed to be written to all the HTML files (which seems obvious in retrospect).
No dice.
After consulting the SixApart forums and not finding anything useful we just applied a good old fashioned "hack" and renamed the mt-tb.cgi file (Moveable Type TrackBack) so it could not be executed. So far it's been working like a charm.
Posted by Aaron R. Deutsch on May 18, 2006 9:54 AM