François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

Over at the DrunkenBlog, the drunkenbatman gives a final farewell to trackback. He joins Tom Coates, Jeremy Zawodny and yours truly in thinking that TrackBacks are dead. I silently killed them months ago, oh the joy of not wasting time cleaning up thousands of spammy pings everyday! I agree with Drunkenbatman that TrackBack Extreme™ is not there yet, even Google's link: feature isn't that good of an option since it takes ages for this information to be updated in Google's index. From what I see here, determined people are used to come and manually link to their post in the comments of the relevant entry, so all the joy is not gone while we're waiting for Puppies Extreme™.

This said, I would not necessarily recomment everyone to get rid of TrackBacks on their blog. It depends if and how badly one is hit by spam, basically one needs to balance the benefits of having TrackBacks and their inconvenience (time, mainly, but sometimes reputation when your blog runs listing of offensive spam before you can clean it) of manually handling them because the design makes them inherently insecure and prone to abuse. Sure you can take some counter measures, like running your site under mod_security (often a good idea) or moderating all TrackBacks a priori but those are still time-consuming and not completely spammer proof. Eat your own TrackBack food and decide for yourself!