I love the new feature that automatically detects inbound links and creates a trackback for them. This is a great extension of the trackback function and was a nice surprise when upgrading to 4.5. However, it could be

(a) an annoyance for a site which contains a lot of documentation and has less emphasis on community and would prefer not to deal with all of the created trackback links in comments.

b) set a site up for potential easy spamming of comments from the outside.

At the moment, it seems that the only option is to manually unpublish the trackback or switch it to the approval queue. I would suggest that the trackback module needs some administrative settings. At minimum,

1) The ability to select whether inbound links to a page are automatically trackbacked, switches for both internal site links and external.

2) An option to set the automatic trackback to needs approval or approved as switches for each of internal and external site links.

These two options ought to give an administrator much more flexibility in using trackback for her site. Other, perhaps less important configuration options would be

1) set trackback globally on or off on a node type basis in the content configuration workflow menu

2) toggle it off individually on a per node basis in the "options" list when adding/editing a node.

Comments

ankur’s picture

ankur commented

Thanks for checking out the trackback module. As for some of the things you mentioned:

We've gotten a couple of concerns about trackbacks being included in the comments section as well as the seperate trackback section, this has really been a temporary design decision until we get more feedback from the community. We want to see how trackback is used and whether including a trackback in the comment's section is more appropriate than just having a seperate tab for trackbacks. For now, we plan to leave both in.

As for the potential of trackbacks that are really just spam, I'll talk to drumm (lead dev here at CivicSpace) about including a switch that can put trackbacks in some kind of approval queue.

Trackback approval on a peruser basis is something that may add a layer of flexibility that may be on the borderline of making the module to confusing to use. This is something that I'll put in the category of 'waiting for community response' as well as the distinction between trackbacks to and from internal and external links.

Workflow configuration: the latest version of the module in the CVS allows for the site admin to decide which node types use trackback (receiving and sending are lumped together as one function however...).

http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/contributions/modules/trackback/

Allowing the ability to toggle trackback on a per-node basis (as opposed to per-node-type) is something we'll definitely look into adding if we get more requests for it.

-Ankur

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

Thanks for the reply. I was glad to give feedback on the module. I really love the autodiscovery in some site setups. We do a lot with educational sites, and the internal autodiscovery means that students blog posts are automatically picked up when they reference each other within the same class site.

To me, having trackback's show up in the comment section is fine. I tend to think that concerns over that are more information/digital literacy skills than true usability problems. Other software often includes trackbacks in a separate display, but that doesn't make it more functional. The disconnect is just a matter of what users are already familiar with. On the other hand, having the trackbacks in the comments section allows users to directly post comments in reply to them and keeps them in the same coversation display as the rest of the comments. So I'd say this implementation is definitely the better design for promoting community and conversation about a blog post.

As for autodiscovery control, note that there is a new issue requesting that feature.

I also think you are right about not needing per user basis for controls. I would just add it into the options that the admin gets for each individual node. That should be enough flexibility with the workflow options you have already provided in the CVS version. Still, an internal/external link autodiscovery configuration option in the trackback module settings might eliminate other concerns that site admins might have.

chris-at-tineb.com’s picture

chris-at-tineb.com commented

My main reason for not wanting trackbacks to be a part of the comments is simply that a trackback will often not give the full content of the post that's pinging your article.

ankur’s picture

ankur commented