Users of Six Apart's Typepad service have been sending me questions about errors they're getting with trackbacks. Charles Hill at Dustbury notes the strange errors user of the Wizbang Standalone Trackback Pinger are seeing, and Basil shares the current response from Six Apart technical support in the comments to that post.
Here's a portion of the last message I sent to someone inquiring about the same error.
- It's a Typepad error. Something they've done now rejects trackbacks, probably those that don't come from the server where the post posted. I know the SpamLookup plugin for MT 3.2 has that behavior by default, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's a similar issue. It happens with my script and with others like the Haloscan trackback script...
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Comments (5)
I just tried to Trackback a... (Below threshold)1. Posted by The Indigent Blogger | October 22, 2005 12:07 PM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
I just tried to Trackback a post from Vagabondia to JustOneMinute and received the following trackback error (using Haloscan):
1. Server IP 72.9.234.70 is too far away from source URL IP 66.102.15.101www.typepad.com /t/trackback/3428971
1. Posted by The Indigent Blogger | October 22, 2005 12:07 PM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on October 22, 2005 12:07
2. Posted by Jay | October 22, 2005 1:00 PM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
In the past I have found most attempts to trackback Typepad blogs from ours result in timeout or rejection failures, so this is almost like SSDD.
Haloscan trackback are less bad, but behave similarly.
2. Posted by Jay | October 22, 2005 1:00 PM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on October 22, 2005 13:00
3. Posted by steve sturm | October 22, 2005 2:29 PM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
I get the same 'too far away' error.
Just curious, it is limited to those trying to trackback from blogspot?
3. Posted by steve sturm | October 22, 2005 2:29 PM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on October 22, 2005 14:29
4. Posted by Anil | October 23, 2005 12:30 AM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
We've been adjusting some settings to fight trackback spam on Typepad, but our team knows that people use your service to send legit trackbacks. So if it remains a problem for a lot of people, we'll keep adjusting until it's fixed.
Is there any kind of authentication or checking to make sure people aren't abusing the service?
4. Posted by Anil | October 23, 2005 12:30 AM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on October 23, 2005 00:30
5. Posted by Kevin | October 23, 2005 12:46 AM | Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
There's no authentication to check for abuse. Since I get hundreds of trackbacks (some of which are spam) every day I've checked to see if they're coming from that page - they're not. The fact that it's not used as a spamming service (to my knowledge) probably is due to how labor intensive it is to actually send the ping. You've got to gather a lot of information. It doesn't lend itself (by design) to sending several pings. It's for one off pinging - spammers are after volume and have tools of their own to ping through a list of URI's.
One thing I've toyed with standing up stand alone ping tool SA released along time ago, wrapped in a Typekey authentication session. If I get a few spare cycles I might just do it, and replace (or redirect) my current 2 year old page with that...
5. Posted by Kevin | October 23, 2005 12:46 AM |
Score: 0 (0 votes cast)
Posted on October 23, 2005 00:46