A Reminder AGAIN On Trackbacks

See? We made one exception to our rule due to extenuating circumstances…and now we see the floodgates opening:

A reminder AGAIN on trackbacks. A trackback is used if you link to someone’s post, then you send them a trackback as a courtesy to let them know you linked to them. Also, readers may then click on those trackbacks to read what you wrote.

It’s not considered polite or actually even legitimate to just stick a trackback on a post because you want to without having linked to that site’s post.

TMV made one exception recently to a news aggregator that hasn’t yet set up the part on its site for moderate blogs. Now today we see at least three other trackbacks that have nothing to do with our posts.

We’ll let those pass. But as of TODAY any trackbacks that do not refer to posts linking to this site are going to be deleted. Note that this site has never sent a trackback to a site unless it links to it. There were two mistaken instances and we immediately apologized.

We also see a comment saying a site linked to us on a subject when the site did not (unless we are blind). We will probably eliminate those comments in the future for the same ethical reasons. And we never eliminate comments.

PS: You’ll note we do LOTS of links on this site especially in Around The Sphere. We have to do manual trackbacks on those and on our roundups. It sometimes takes us hours to do it all. We make sure a site is informed by automatic or manual trackback when we link to them, if they take trackbacks — but never, ever just send a trackback to get a link to a site when we did not link to them.