Trackbacks, Pings, etc. for Forums

[rogerd]

Some newer forum software can be set to ping update services with new posts, and also handle trackbacks to specific threads when they are referenced in a blog, etc.

This seems to offer considerable spam potential, although the idea of extending the community reach in that way is appealing. I also wonder about the advisability of hitting Pingomatic or similar services with thousands of new post pings every day.

Has anyone tried this in a significant way? What kind of results have you had?

[rogerd]

Hmmm, apparently not many are doing this. I'm tempted to give it a try and see what happens.

[linear]

xml-rpc winds up being the culprit in lots of security issues. People don't interact with it, programs do, so not a lot of webmasters have the "feel" for what it does.

I'd want to look hard at the implementation and understand what the risks of turning it on amount to. To me it seem like enabling referral spam with the added downside that the implementation is something a webmaster may not understand especially well.

[JonSimmonds]

A popular SEO add on for vbulletin does this, and I use it on a couple of my sites. It does prevent spam in that the option is there for me (or my mods) to manually verify all link backs etc before they get listed in public

Whats interesting is the number of link backs i get from my competitors, alot more than I thought I would