How to Turn Off Trackback

Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under WordPress Configuration, WordPress Spam |

First, why you turn off trackback and when do you need to do it? Many WP bloggers turn off tackback to stop comment spam. In general, there are 2 ways for spam bots to get into your blog, one is from submitting comments in the post page, the other is through trackback.

To stop spam comment submission, Peter’s Anti-Spam plugin does good job, or you may just turn off comment if you don’t need it on your site.

WordPress provides options to let you trun off pingback/trackback on either site level or post level. To turn off pingback/trackback for the entire site, go to Options menu in admin panel and select Discussion submenu, then uncheck “Allow link notifications from other weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)

If you want to turn off trackback for an individual post, just uncheck “Allow Pings” under Discussion block in the post edit page.

Optionally you can set all post to not allow pings by running a SQL statement on the MySQL database directly. Login to your web hosting control panel, to get phpmyadmin to run this SQL:

Update wp_posts set ping_status=”closed”

where wp is the prefix you would be using for your WordPress tables.

This should disable trackbacks on all posts.

But unfortunitally, nowadays spammers get much smarter. They build efficient bots to send hundreds of comment messages to your blog via your site’s trackback system, even if you have shutdown the comment and turned off trackback/pingback function in the Discussion Options admin panel. They are able to do this by directly dealing with “wp-trackbacks.php” file which was installed in the root directory.

Therefore, to definitely trun off trackback, just delete or rename “wp-trackbacks.php” file in the WP installation directory.

Be ware of that this will turn off both trackback and pingback. While trackback is not much useful, pingback is preferred for most blogs (see Don’t Trackback. Use Pingback). In this case, the better solution might be to hide trackback or use plugins to fight spam.

Comments

One Response to “How to Turn Off Trackback”

  1. How To Hide Trackback : WordPress Profit on October 28th, 2007 12:55 am

    [...] my previous post “How to Turn Off Trackback“I mentioned that a simple way to stop automatic trackback spam is to remove wp-trackback.php [...]

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