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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

Do you use Trackbacks? Do you know anyone, who still uses Trackbacks? When what the last time you received a non-spam trackback?

Because webmentions are alive. Sometimes you need to re-visit and re-pack things to bring them back again.

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I use trackbacks, since my chosen blog engine (serendipity) supports them. I know a number of other bloggers and they all use trackbacks. My last non-spam trackback came in on Nov 9 2015, 08:02, ignoring the ones I sent to myself (I was not very active in the meantime).

Trackbacks are alive as well. But yes, they should be revisited and repackaged, I agree that they could need a popularity boost. But that is possible without breaking compatibility for no reason.

Yes, Trackbacks or Pingbacks could have been extended to include a similar pull-parse behaviour as webmentions are doing right now.

In fact I was reminded that originally webmentions were on top of pingbacks: http://tantek.com/2013/113/b1/first-federated-indieweb-comme...

As far as I understand that change is mostly for simplification, which always a good thing.

Being on top of pingbacks makes no sense, xml-rpc is dead and a bad idea in a first place, also a lot harder to implement than just reacting to a ping + pretty much incompatible with the pull concept. If they started there, they probably did not know trackbacks existed.

Webmentions are no simpler than trackbacks, and to have them diverge for no reason makes everything more complicated for the engine. It is no straight-forward simplification at all, thus no good thing.

For backwards compatibility there is a (open source) tool which will forward pingbacks to your webmentions endpoint https://webmention.io/

Thanks for the link, I appreciate the idea. Sadly, this seems useless for me. I'd need a service that I can point to in the head that converts the webmention to a trackback (and not a pingback, though that would work as well if absolutely necessary, but by default pingbacks have no description which could collide in some themes; also a harder codepath) and then sends the trackback to the blog. Fetching that later with JS is no option, it has to end up in the database.

I hope I did not just miss that (now again and when I saw it the last time), but this does not seem to capable of that.

Hi there, I made webmention.io. I haven't updated the readme or home page yet, but I recently added a "web hook" feature which is similar to what you're talking about with Trackbacks. The service will receive and verify the webmention, parse the page, and then send a post request with the contents of the comment. The format it sends looks like this http://indiewebcamp.com/jf2#Example

So, it's not quite trackback, but hopefully it's more useful!

Nice, yes, that is similar. It would be a lot more useful for me to get a trackback though – to make the blog engine receive webmentions by just converting a webmention to a trackback by your or another service would be the easiest way possible.

And something I would push into our html markup and debug (the service in the middle might make some origin checks fail), despite my concerns with webmentions as a spec and concept.

I just made an issue to capture that request, that could definitely be interesting. https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.io/issues/62

The main reason Webmention is less susceptible to spam than Trackback is, is because with Trackback, there is no requirement that the comment text have its own URL. At least with Webmention, a spammer has to create a URL for the spam comment.

The webmention.io service sends a secret token in the payload so you can verify the request came from there.

That is what I kind of tackled above, I think: In practice, all blog engines will confirm that the URL the trackback points to actually contains a link to the site receiving the trackback. I see no practical difference there between the two protocols. But your use of comments and comment urls makes me think I might miss your point?

Thanks for opening the issue, I will add a comment and subscribe.

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