MovableBlog: Ethics of TrackBack
February 26, 2003
PB wonders about the ethics of using a form to post a TrackBack to a site. I'm not worried. The resulting links on my site don't contain author information, just a link to a post and an excerpt in the title attribute. (The author information, correct or not, gets sent to me by email.) Now, is there potential for abuse in the excerpt? Sure. Does it matter at this point, seeing as how I get only 200 visits a day? No. (Aside: there hasn't been any pings in the last few days: did I break it?) Plus I can—and do—delete the TrackBack's that are not related in some way to Movable Type. As for pinging my sidebar with a post written by someone else, again, I have no problem with that: there's no author information that goes public, and I envisioned the sidebar as content (not very much content, that is) that my only my readers have control over. It's just like putting a link to a post on your own weblog, except, well, it goes on mine.
Be sure to read Mena's response in the comments, too. [link via Anil]
Comments
Nope, you didn't break the sidebar, as I just discovered by saving yet another old entry that hadn't yet pinged. I really need to go through every entry in categories that ping you, and manually stuff your sidebar's URL in the database as already pinged.
Posted by: Phil Ringnalda | February 28, 2003 07:24 AM