Just over a month ago, I discovered the Trackback Validator plugin for WordPress. Just in the nick of time, as the majority of spammers had just then turned to trackbacking as the preferred method of shooting out their oceans of digital junk (and, consequently, seem to have abandoned commenting as a delivery method — a good and bad thing).

Validator was working very well. Based on a simple premise — that the pages hyperlinked in a trackback should be linking back to the trackbacked post — it deflected literally dozens of spam pings every day. Every so often, a bad egg would slip through, but nothing major. I was pretty much assured that the only trackbacks that made it through were legitimate ones.

Dan Sandler and his crew have been busy refining the plug-in, including input from my use of it (happy to help). The result has been the next version of Trackback Validator, version 0.6 (replacing 0.5).

The problem: This new version doesn’t work.

Or, as far as I can figure, it works too well: It’s blocking out all trackbacks, evil or not. So if you’ve tried to send a trackback here over the past week, and it’s not showing up, that’s why.

I’ve been back-and-forthing with Dan and Andy Thomas about the problem. I think we’re slowly figuring out what’s fouling things up (actually, my role is more that of the guinea pig; they’re doing the heavy lifting).

Part of the purpose of this post is to simply provide something from which to send a legitimate trackback to the plugin’s home blog. Of course, I didn’t have to write out this long of a post to do that…

So, having accomplished the first goal of this post, here’s the second: A reminder to myself to not delete prior versions of plugins when upgrading them. I’m kicking myself that I irretrievably trashed the 0.5 version of Validator after replacing it with 0.6, because if I had my way, I’d re-install the old version right now, and get things back to working order. But no dice, and I can’t find another place to download 0.5 (if anyone knows of a source, or even has the previous version’s files, let me know). I’m sure Dan and Andy will find a way to fix 0.6, but I can’t stand leaving things broken, even for a little while.

I realize there are other plugins that will do the same thing and more (Spam Karma and others). I’m avoiding them because they seem like overkill. Trackback Validator fit the bill nicely, and hopefully will do so again soon.