Hmmm...much to consider here...and a few things to clarify as well....
To answer that...
1/ You misunderstand my contention regarding search friendly URLs. It is my contention that they do not help search engines, but the converse is also true: *not* having them doesn't help search engines either. The absence or presence of said feature, then, is virtually pure aesthetics. I'm not against pretty URLs provided that there is an awareness that they are purely aesthetic - to claim they have any kind of SEO benefit is BS.
The misunderstanding isn't mine, actually; it's an explanation I got from 2 different people who run other SMF boards. I don't personally know one way or another if that's a fact. I daresay that the bump we've hit here is a difference in level of experience/expertise and I, the taker of advice from numerous quarters, am at the bottom of the skill level scale. What I've said is what I've heard--not what I know. And so take your opinion as a valuable one in this respect (I'm still learning).
2/ I didn't say that it was WP's code that was the issue, because it isn't. There is an established protocol for trackbacks where you have inter-site communications, which must be implemented for it to work. A trackback facility that only one system uses isn't much help unless that one system is by definition, everywhere.
Gri's discussions aren't about trackbacks, they're about having the same discussion physically *duplicated* in two separate places so that there is no ability of one party to edit them.
I know that, and submit that this is why Gri sticks with only SMF boards. He hasn't (that I know of) attempted any of this on any other type of boardware. It is conceivable that what Gri thinks is possible is due to his own code skill level (not quite at your level but certainly better than mine). My interest in Gri's quest is similar but not identical--Gri's confinement to SMF boards only rather suggests that what he's after can be applied to a research discussion community, set of communities all of which use SMF, to allow cross-pollination, as it were, of interdisciplinary discussions. A scenario would be a precision mechanical community cross-talking with a sensor-focused community, both of which cross talk with a GUI community, and what you get out of this is that each "team" focuses on their specialty while the cross-talk results in a robot.
You can't develop robots without being interdisciplinary, and being too interdisciplinary results in a lack of focus due toward each component. It seems that you, as a member of a development team, can see the need for the specialties of core, themes, and add-ons but also see where it's critical that they all work together seamlessly.
Gri just wants Freedom of Moving Thoughts because he gets his discussions interrupted by getting banned a lot. Me, I have other uses for this sort of capability, and have been on boards where I have wished THEY had this capability because of my going back to old posts and lines of discussions which have had to jump to a different board only to find that they've had to repeat themselves. A board-to-board trackback of a discussion would mean that people didn't have to repeat themselves when jumping to a different board.
I'm in the process of reconstituting a thread of discussion that appeared on the now-defunct PBS Discussions board, and it's a helluva lot of work; had those discussions been portable, this task would be a helluva lot easier (although still a lot of work); having specific trackback links would be able to produce individual posts in, say, a Google cache. Conceivably.
The trackback protocol, as designed, is endemically flawed: it has no mechanism for authentication, consequently any site can generate a trackback, which means any site can *spam* you with trackbacks. Imagine a system able to post that doesn't require registration, doesn't require to enter a name but only has to posts a small snippet of text and a link back to their site. I have deleted many many spam trackbacks from InI but have yet to see one that wasn't actually spam.
I hadn't thought of that angle...thanks for bringing that to my attention. However, I get spamming anyway. I don't see how anything I do reduces the spam attacks. All I can do is hope to have the tools to disallow them. Seems to me that right-clicking a post should produce the trackback without permitting you to post as if you'd hit the quote button as only registered members can do. Under the scenario you submit here, I agree that's a major vulnerability. I just wonder if it has to be a vulnerability when given more thought/design. "Make a better
mousetrap spammertrap and the world will beat a path to your door", as it were.
3/ The concept of a trackback is cute, but as explained, the moment you start applying real life to it, it starts to fall apart. If you then proceed to implement a new trackback scheme, it's only valid as far as Wedge installs go: until Wedge is ubiquitous, implementing it in a new form is basically useless.
It doesn't have to be ubiquitous, and Gri's focus on exclusively SMF boards rather illustrates that point vividly. I'm certain he's aware that his Freedom of Moving Thoughts extends no further than only SMF boards and not across the whole of cyberspace.
Trackbacks do NOT make discussions portable if you listen to what the specification actually provides for: all it does is provide for a method for one discussion to reference another. Essentially it's the equivalent of an unregistered user saying "My post referenced yours, come read mine at <link>"
Well, that's the utility that Gri seeks, being a guy who gets banned a lot and who still wants to carry on whatever discussion got interrupted by the banishment. Shoot, I've been in that spot myself in the political debate arena and don't blame him a bit for looking for a work-around. But like I said, my interests in his quest have a different application in mind, as outlined by the hypothetical robotics engineering teams talking with each other.
From what I've read about the ongoing friction between the fork and SMF prime, I have to wonder if such a capability would have resulted in a smoother sense of team operation. But what do I know--I'm just an outside spectator.
Posted: July 22nd, 2011, 06:49 AM
OK, look at it this way: while the onward effect of spam (it being visible to Google and regular users) can be curtailed, it's still there and it's still something that has to be cleaned up by the moderators in some way, and it's a source of incoming stuff that wasn't there before.
As it happens, there is actually a small module of Bad Behaviour tied specifically to trackback spam...
Just because spammers don't get any payoff, doesn't mean they won't spam, it just means that human spammers are discouraged (doesn't stop them trying!) and bots will do what they do anyway.l
Exactly. Thank you.
I would prefer to PM you about a slick li'l thing Gri did about spammers that I think is a minor stroke of genius. Don't want to talk about it in public, for now, but it's worthy of consideration, IMHO. If I implemented the scheme, I'd get into major trouble with my host...still...genius.
