I don’t understand how/if webmentions are significantly different from the pingbacks everbody used to have on their WordPress blog (because I think they were enabled by default?) and then promptly disabled because of too much spam.
Webmentions have been modeled after pingback. They are basically a refinement.
Regarding spam, well, as always when you are exposing a write permission though the web, you are more or less vulnerable. This problem has and is still discussed within the indieweb community. A protocol, Vouch has been proposed to address this problem.
And as mentioned below, you still can moderate or simply not display your webmentions altogether.
Did anyone ever care about pingbacks though? Even the non-spammy ones?
I can only speak for myself, but I did. It often gave me access to blogs by people with similar interests that I would have otherwise never known about to visit. It used to be that a large percentage of bloggers would list their favourite blogs somewhere on every page (sidebar/footer) so finding one blog with an author who shared similar interests could end up in a twenty five link binge.
I guess it was a different time, then again it was over a decade ago.
I was wondering that, unless these aren’t intended to be published in verbose and instead used more as a notification for the author and only really published publicly as a counter?
If the pingbacks had been used simply to list in the authors admin places where their articles had been mentioned and not published alongside comments to the article then there would have been a lot less spam.
Vouch was mentioned here already, but for now, just requiring a valid h-entry reply/like/repost/etc. instead of just a link works well enough. Of course spammers can start posting proper replies, but they haven’t yet.
I don’t understand how/if webmentions are significantly different from the pingbacks everbody used to have on their WordPress blog (because I think they were enabled by default?) and then promptly disabled because of too much spam.
Webmentions have been modeled after pingback. They are basically a refinement.
Regarding spam, well, as always when you are exposing a write permission though the web, you are more or less vulnerable. This problem has and is still discussed within the indieweb community. A protocol, Vouch has been proposed to address this problem.
And as mentioned below, you still can moderate or simply not display your webmentions altogether.
Did anyone ever care about pingbacks though? Even the non-spammy ones?
Presumably? I mean, they got implemented, right? Someone spent the time to make that happen.
I can only speak for myself, but I did. It often gave me access to blogs by people with similar interests that I would have otherwise never known about to visit. It used to be that a large percentage of bloggers would list their favourite blogs somewhere on every page (sidebar/footer) so finding one blog with an author who shared similar interests could end up in a twenty five link binge.
I guess it was a different time, then again it was over a decade ago.
I was wondering that, unless these aren’t intended to be published in verbose and instead used more as a notification for the author and only really published publicly as a counter?
If the pingbacks had been used simply to list in the authors admin places where their articles had been mentioned and not published alongside comments to the article then there would have been a lot less spam.
Vouch was mentioned here already, but for now, just requiring a valid h-entry reply/like/repost/etc. instead of just a link works well enough. Of course spammers can start posting proper replies, but they haven’t yet.