A short while ago while chatting about something completely unrelated with a friend, the discussion took a diversion to whether blogs must allow comments or not. I offered as my point of view that anyone who has something worthwile enough to comment with is free to do so in their own blog. Today I learned that Dave Winer and Joel Spolsky made similar arguments last year.

What makes me uneasy about this opinion is that this is what trackbacks were designed for, yet most blogs have them disabled, too, for rather obvious spam reasons (well, obvious to anyone who has a blog).

Never mind how to fix comment spam -- that's easy enough, with timing, CAPTCHA or OpenID checks. But how can trackback spam be fixed? Not that this blog gets many (valid) comments OR trackbacks (nor traffic for that matter, but that's fine by me), but I do have enough of cleanup to do in the moderation/spam queue for both that I can imagine for a big blog, the TB spam filtering is way worse than email spam.