Trackback spam a nightmare for TypePad users, while WordPress anti-spam filters and plugins make for smooth sailing

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That’s it – I’ve had it!  Even though SixApart introduced comment and trackback moderation for TypePad, it still does not diminish the termendous amount of work I stilll need to do sorting through legitmate trackbacks amongst the hoards of trackback spam.  Effective immediately, I am now turning off trackback functionality on all of my TypePad blogs and you can thank the spammers for it.

This brings TypePad’s usefulness as a blogging platform down for me, as I consider TrackBacks to be an critical feature of blogging and connecting the strands of the blogosphere.

As I’ve mentioned before, handling trackback and comment spam is where WordPress really blows the competition away.  WordPress is smarter than TypePad in recognizing spam and filtering it into a seperate queue for moderation, where I can scan through the hoard and do a ‘mark all as spam’ and get back to what I was doing.  It’s almost effortless.

Six Apart – where are your spam filtering tools?  You guys can do better than this.  Until TypePad can recognize that trackbacks that talk about donkey sex, incest, child porn, and rape are pretty darn likely to be SPAM and put it in a seperate area labeling it as such, I must turn off my TrackBacks on TypePad.  And that’s a shame for both me and the blogging community.   Oh and while I'm griping, I'll now add that I just realized that TypePad's Configure tab only gives me the option of turning off trackbacks for new posts.  I now ALSO have to manually go through each and every post I ever created and edit the post, and then uncheck the checkbox that says "Accept TrackBacks".  There is no tool for mass editing acceptance of TrackBacks on older posts.  Shoot me now.

For those who are still wondering, I’m still torn between whether I prefer TypePad over WordPress, and when time permits intend to write a comprehensive comparison of the two (each has it’s own pros and cons, and is better or less suited for certain tasks/people), although WP is leaping ahead now that the TrackBack spam has become such an enormous problem in TypePad, despite the addition of new comment and trackback management tools...