Today I discovered that this site was hit with over 50,000 spammy trackbacks, all for sites offering prescription drugs and adult content. They also managed to hit my comments, too, although not as bad.

As a result, I am temporarily disabling trackbacks and I have added a captcha image for all new comments. I apologize for the inconvenience and hope everyone understands. I have tried the Akismet tool in the past, but had occasional troubles when their server wasn't available, and it resulted in errors and lag time. I hope to enable trackbacks again when I have a solid spam-fighting technique in place, but for now we'll have to live without them.