Update: Seems to work fine now, please let me know by e-mail if there are any problems (tomer at tomergabel dot com).

Apparently there is some sort of problem with the comment system, and it breaks in at least one case. I'm working on the problem, in the meantime feel free to use any of the other methods of contacting me if you need to.

As I mentioned before, I've had well over 300 trackback/pingback spam notifications from dasBlog. Since this was well beyond what I was willing to mess with by hand, I whipped up a quick Outlook macro to do the work for me:

Sub DeleteTrackback()
    Dim oSel As Outlook.Selection
    Dim oItem As Outlook.MailItem
    
    Dim oShell
    Set oShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")

    Set oSel = Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection
    For x = 1 To oSel.Count
        Set oItem = oSel.Item(x)
        
        If (Left(oItem.Subject, 19) = "Weblog trackback by") Or _
           (Left(oItem.Subject, 18) = "Weblog pingback by") Then
            Index = InStr(1, oItem.Body, "Delete Trackback:")
            If (Index <> 0) Then
                URL = Mid(oItem.Body, Index + 18)
                URL = Left(URL, Len(URL) - 1)
                
                oShell.ShellExecute URL, "", "", "open", 1
            End If
        End If
        
    Next
End Sub

To use this macro, create a new macro and paste the source code; then select all the "Trackback/Pingback" notifications messages and run the macro. It could obviously be customized to work on entire folders or whatever, but that I leave to you. One final suggestion: if you (like me) keep a 15-tab Firefox window open at all times, you may want to open a new window (not tab, window!) so that you can then close all the URLs at once.

Ever since I upgraded to dasBlog 1.9 this blog was quite literally FLOODED with trackback spam. At first I tried to cut down on the spam using the various available techniques (IP-based blacklists, word-based blacklists, 404 responses to offenders), but unlike e-mail bayesian filtering, it's far more difficult to properly rate seemingly innocent URLs. Even if the current crop of spambots are relatively stupid and use blacklisted words in the page title, the next generation is bound to be more obscure.

At any rate I couldn't cope with the volume of spam (I have well over 200 spam trackbacks waiting to be deleted, and that's just from the last few days) and decided to turn off trackbacks and pingbacks. I wish I didn't have to do this - in many ways it feels like switching off what makes blogging special to begin with - but I don't have the time to deal with the impossible amounts of spam.

If anyone has any ideas on how to resolve this without turning off trackbacks, though, I'm definitely willing to give it a try...