Auto-removal of invalid trackbacks (from own blog)?

[DrNI]

Hi s9y-folks!

some last time long ago I bothered you with questions about mass-removal of old posts. Well, this one is solved and I keep deleting my personal past. Now I got quite some trackbacks from my own blog or even the old address of my own blog. But more and more of these articles have gone away now, so I got trackbacks guiding people into the void. Is there a way to find and delete those automatically?

Since S9Y doesn't make a difference between trackbacks from "home" and from the outside, this would probably need some more voodoo. Is there a general trackback checker based on a crawler?

Any input on this is welcome. Thanks for your time.

DrNI

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

currenlty not. But since the trackbacks are saved in the database in a very easy format, one could write a simple parser without any s9y dependencies, simply use an sql query to fetch trackbacks, iterate over them with a HTTP GET request and evaluate the response. Best would be to create your own temporary table to keep track of which trackbacks have been saved; because old hosts etc. will probably return timeouts and such, so the PHP script could easily timeout on your server.

Also, the script probably won't be able to see if a trackback is a valid page, or if there is new content (from another provider or software) on the page. This coulld only be done manually.

Thinking about it, an automatted crawler probably isn't worth much if the links are still valid but point to "bad" content, so checking them manually is probably the only real way to go.

Regards,
Garvin