Trouble with Trackbacks

We finally found the problem with the comment software. The folks that write it decided to add a trackback feature, similar to WordPress. It’s one of the reasons why we didn’t migrate to WordPress long ago. Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t work… and sites that auto-trackback don’t hook on. Unless you’re manually doing the trackback, it falls through. Nice… not.

So, they come out with version 2.0 of the software. We just found out, much to our disgust, that it broke the anti-spam components of the trackback module. Guess how many trackback spams we had in our database?

Almost 600,000! And, our comment software was grinding the server to a halt parsing all of them.

Worse, once we finally isolated this bug, we found that disabling the cheesy trackback mode doesn’t work either… trackbacks keep getting logged in the database.

We’ve sent along all this data to the coders that write the Joomla add-on. If they fix it or not really isn’t material to us, we’ll be on WordPress next month, and as such, I’m not going to spend any more time working on it. Comments may not be back until January.

Because of this, all remaining giveaways will likely be run out of the forums. Just one more great reason to sign up there…