Wednesday, February 13, 2008 2:17 AM
I tried to publish the Office Live post this morning after the keynote, but I got an error about being out of disk space. That made no sense. I haven't uploaded files in awhile -- in fact, nothing much has changed lately (I'm disappointed to say...). The error specifically mentioned being out of space in the PRIMARY filegroup indicating a database error. GoDaddy limits SQL Server hosting space so in fact, it really had to be the database. Curiouser and curiouser...
Well I signed into the admin area and immediately thought of checking Feedback (the only thing I have little control over!). I was blown away to see that that Subtext had flagged nearly 90,000 comments/trackbacks as spam and approved just over 200,000! Now I'm not being humble when I say that my blog isn't that popular. If I've ever even had 200,000 page views in a year I'd be happy! To see that I had that many illegitimate trackbacks though is disappointing. I use Akismet for comment vetting, but apparently there is no similar support for trackbacks.
It was so bad that I couldn't use the admin interface -- it was a query window only! I finally got it trimmed down, but I probably lost a few good ones in the process. I had to make some guesses on a few things and couldn't possibly check them all!
For now, I've disabled trackbacks. At the moment I deleted them, I refreshed the admin view, and it already showed a new trackback. It was up to ten in a minute. I'll see if there's a better way to filter these, but I think I just can't use them. I don't even know if ReverseDOS could handle this since the little snippets are so nonsensical. We need a heuristic that checks to see if the sentence makes any sense grammatically. Granted I would get false negatives, but it has to be better than this!