How huge? Way huger than junk comments. Thankfully, the spam filters in Movable Type catch both.
Over the last two months or so, I've caught around 20 junk comments. It's mostly automatic—roughly 50% of the time, it junks comments automatically. 45% of the time, it flags them as spam and requires me to approve them before they're posted to the site (which, invariably, I don't), and the remaining 5% of the time, they get through. I keep a pretty close tab on comments that are posted here, so I doubt any illegitimate comments have stayed around for more than a day or so. Comments from wiseasses, of course, stick around forever.
So in contrast, I've been getting trackback spam for about three months. And how many of those have I gotten?
Well, the count right now is at 1302 junk trackbacks. That's around 40 times the volume of comment spam.
Movable Type has caught all but one of these—and I think the only reason that one got through was because it didn't link to a site loaded with sex ads.
It's a good thing I don't have to catch these by hand, because I would have shut down trackbacks entirely a long time ago if I did. 1300 in three months? That's just ridiculous.
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