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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I helped create pingback [https://simonwillison.net/tags/pingback/], which eventually made it into WordPress and hence achieved pretty widespread distribution.

My concern here is spam. With hindsight both Pingback and Trackbacks (which Pingback was a response to) essentially became APIs fit spammers to add junk to your site. Can webmention avoid the sane fate?

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BTW, there's a pretty good discussion of pingback compared to webmention here, including how to bridge between them and some of the spam problems too https://indieweb.org/pingback

I would think that because most of the sites are static, they are going to be doing some moderation before re-rendering and posting the linkbacks.

The README says that one of the steps is verification [https://github.com/converspace/webmention/blob/master/README...], but it's a little disappointing that it's essentially an "exercise left for the reader".

"The receiver SHOULD perform a HTTP GET request on source to confirm that it actually links to target"

We did that in pingback too. It turned out to be trivial for spammers to circumvent.

That's a bummer. Did you find out any other more robust ways to filter out spam ?

I gave up and stopped using it (well, I didn't bother reimplementing it on one of my various blog engine rewrites).

If I were to implement pingback or webmention today I'd use a moderation queue with the ability to allow-list trusted domains so they get to skip moderation in the future.

I've implemented WebMentions in a project that uses it as a push notification system for websites that integrate our widget (which is just a <script> tag they include on their page). That kinda works: if you integrate the widget, you know you can expect WebMentions from https://plaudit.pub, and thus add it to an explicit allowlist.

https://github.com/zerok/webmentiond has allow list and block lists :) I am very happy using it

Most POST spam is repetitive. It's very rare human POSTs are. If you filter out any POSTs that happen identically more than 3 times you remove most spam. It's not perfect but it makes it manageable. Of course this is a lot easier to implement if you batch process.

I've had them on my sites for a few years now, and even with bridgy passing tweet replies through the spam hasn't been too bad, but certainly adding an allow-list makes sense too. Having built Technorati that effectively did this at scale, I do appreciate the spam problem, but decentralising implementations has so far worked out OK.

Marty writes up some of the variety of implementations here https://martymcgui.re/2020/07/15/what-we-talk-about-when-wer... (which I saw because he webmentioned my in it).

I think Webmention is viable at the moment just because of the low adoption across the web. Just like with pingbacks and trackbacks, any kind of manual moderation becomes infeasible when valid posts get swarmed under thousands of automated spam posts.

The typical verification step (check if the originating site contains a valid link) is trivial to work around. One attempt to address that is Vouch [1], but I believe it's largely untested in the wild.

[1] https://indieweb.org/Vouch

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