Simon is a hands-on software architect who works within 
[Twitter] simonbrown: wondering whether Adobe's commercial approach to Flex Builder will limit adoption of Flex ... which will be a shame, because I quite like it
[Coding the Architecture] As mentioned before, we were speakers at, and community sponsors of the Software Architect 2008 conference (3rd-5th June 2008, London). This is the first dedicated software architecture conference that I've been to and the majority of the ...
Pluggable TrackBack confirmation strategies
Advanced spam protection comes to TrackBacks
I've just put the finishing touches on some enhancements to allow the Pluggable comment confirmation strategies to be used for TrackBacks too. I've had several ideas for integrating something similar in the past, but with TrackBacks being delivered autonomously, it's not easy to get a human to confirm them after the event. Instead, I've changed the way that TrackBacks are sent to Pebble blog entries.
In current versions, a reader can just navigate to the blog entry they want to send a TrackBack to, grab the TrackBack link and send the TrackBack. With Pebble 2.0.0, TrackBack links need to be generated and are good only for a single use. The overall process of sending a TrackBack is now as follows.
- The reader finds the blog entry they want to send a TrackBack to and clicks the TrackBack link.
- If the reader is logged in and is a blog owner/publisher/contributor for the blog, they are implicitly trusted and confirmation is not required.
- If Pebble determines that confirmation is required, the reader will be redirected to a page where they will be asked to confirm that they want to generate a TrackBack link, using the strategy configured for the blog.
- Only successful confirmation will result in the generation of a single use TrackBack link that the reader can use to send a TrackBack to the blog entry.
As with comments, the confirmation process is all configurable and overridable, with prebuilt strategies including a button click, simple maths problem, image captcha and a no-op strategy where confirmation isn't required. All this is in Subversion. Expect Pebble 2.0.0-RC1 later this week or next.
Re: Pluggable TrackBack confirmation strategies
As long as I can do trackback moderation, I'm good with having trackback auto-discovery. (which by the way, it's as easy as adding text to the blogEntry.jsp page).
