Phil Gyford

My frequently cranky installation of Movable Type began throwing up even more Internal Server Errors than usual at the weekend. They seemed to appear instead of any admin screen that would show some TrackBacks. So I poked around in the database and realised the number of junk TrackBacks received by the system had rocketed recently, as made obvious by this graph:

Each column is a week, starting when I upgraded to MT3 last year. For the last few months of 2005 the number of junk TrackBacks received hovered around the 1,000 per week mark but started shooting up just before Christmas. Each of the past two weeks I’ve received over 46,000 junk TrackBacks! Is this just me or has everyone experienced such a huge increase recently?

To its credit, MT has let only a handful of these through — there was a bad rash of a couple of dozen one day but otherwise it’s been almost nothing. I deleted all these in the database which seemed to clear up most, but not all, of my Internal Server Errors. Then I found MT’s option to delete this spam automatically, which will hopefully help in future.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t fixed the Internal Server Errors that often appear when anyone tries posting a comment, to the frequent frustration of Pepys’ Diary annotators. Grrrr.