User Comments

I entirely understand your point of view regarding trackbacks. However, you must put yourself in the situation of the visitor. In the visitors case, a trackback (or a pingback for that matter), is also a kind of comment. It’s just a comment on your article that is hosted elsewhere.

So if your problem is that trackbacks represent a form of self-celebration, then how does that differ from what comments are?

Trackbacks also serve a different purpose, namely to “continue the discussion elsewhere”, perhaps even a little off-topic. External links, after all, aren’t egotistic?

I’m not saying this to defend trackbacks/pingbacks, because frankly I find them rather useless. I’m merely trying to explain their purpose.

Thanks for that Joen. TrackBacks make a lot more sense to me now. I entirely missed the “continue the discussion elsewhere” principle.

Is it safe to say then, that TrackBacks are not necessary on my website because I have a comments handler running - and visitors can simply post a comment along the lines of: “I’ve discussed this topic further on my weblog at example.com”? Or am I assuming too much of my readers?

Generically, it’s a way of notifying a site that a similar resource is available somewhere else. Of course, the most common application is that when someone writes about a topic being inspired by, or in response to, some other site, but you can imagine more productive applications, like for instance automatically listing the mirrors of some content (mirror the content and then trackback it to this page)

It also fosters Google PageRank whoring, but sometimes in a good way, since you create a solid web of links to relevant content (hopefully, but you can always delete irrelevant pings).

Is it safe to say then, that TrackBacks are not necessary on my website because I have a comments >handler running - and visitors can simply post a comment along the lines of: “I’ve discussed this topic >further on my weblog at example.com”? Or am I assuming too much of my readers?

That is exactly right. As I mentioned, I find trackbacks to be relatively useless. However, it is unlikely that people will write such a comment, as trackbacks (by nature) are often off topic. Furthermore, pingbacks, which are somewhat similar to trackbacks, are often automatic. Wordpress, for instance, has an option to automatically pingback URLs linked in a post, when publishing.

Thank you Joen and Gabriel. I have a much better understanding of the (Track|Ping)Back concept now.

I have decided that I don’t need to employ either on this website (for now at least) as neither technology justifies the effort involved in implementation.

However, you have opened my eyes to principles behind the technologies and I can certainly appreciate their value in certain circumstances (ecommerce, academia, etc).

Thanks for the props. I had to ponder using trackbacks on my own site. I’ll admit that I ended up implementing on my site for “ego-stroking”, as you put it. In my case, it’s more ego-stroking by pinging other sites rather than having others ping to me.

On the other hand, trackbacks can be useful because they’re kind of like footnotes (or “Other References”), if you think about it. I ping other people’s topics because I want an easy way to show them that I’ve enjoyed what they’ve written and I want them to know that I’ve got additional words (as opposed to direct comments on their site) pertaining to the topic. For example, you could have pinged http://zepfanman.com/archives/000044.php for this post. I’ve read about auto-pinging on MT, I believe (as Joen mentions); I kind of like that idea. I hope to have a few more trackback tweaks on my page in the coming weeks. Nice thread, DarkBlue.

I’m not really pro or against trackbacks, I have them enabled for the sole reason that it’s Wordpress’s default behavior, and if someone wants to use them they have that option.

I would agree however that they’re probably not worth implementing if there’s too much overhead involved, and the minute it starts giving me problems such as spam I’m taking it down.

This article over at daring fireball is probably the most measured look at the whole trackback mechanism I’ve seen yet, well worth a read.

if someone wants to use them they have that option

That’s a good way of looking at it.

John Gruber’s article was certainly worth reading has confirmed, once and for all, that I don’t need to expend the time writing a TrackBack handler.

Thanks Diogo.