Spammy Trackbacks/Pingbacks

Hi @jcatbic

if you turned off “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” in the WP discussion settings this shouldn’t happen at all.

Does this began after our latest update or was the problem seen before?

All the best
Torsten

@jcatbic This needs more debugging. Can you please send us a list of your active theme and plugins. Are you using the latest WP version? Have you access to the access logs?

Can you send us the trackbacks through our report form?

Thanks in advance!

All the best
Torsten

Hi @jcatbic

the link can be found in the FAQ. Here it is:
http://goo.gl/forms/ITzVHXkLVL

Any chance to provide us a list of your active theme and plugins?

All the best
Torsten

Hi @jcatbic

you wrote “I’ve turned off allowing them in WP Discussion Settings”, but these are just the default settings for *new* posts.

See: https://wordpress.org/support/article/settings-discussion-screen/#default-article-setting

This does not change the status for existing posts, therefore these posts are still receiving trackbacks.

You need to disable this setting on each post:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-disable-trackbacks-and-pings-on-existing-wordpress-posts/

If you mark those trackbacks as spam this could help if you utilize the local spam db (the comments in the “spam” list from your comments). But this just works if the spammer is using something similar (same IP, same E-Mail, etc.), so we can detect it. Nowadays most spam is coming from botnets so it is not easy to detect it, because these values change with every spam trackback/comment.

You can also try to use the blocklist in WordPress to stop spam on detected “bad words”. We are having this plugin (https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/blacklist-updater/) which is using a very big list (https://github.com/splorp/wordpress-comment-blacklist).

But you can also grab just parts of it and use your own version without any automatic updates.

Hope this helps!

All the best
Torsten