I'm in a bit of a quandry here.  A while ago (a couple of months ago, actually) I was contacted by someone out thar on the ol' intarweb about a wee tool I wrote called PingTrackBack.

 

PingTrackBack is a simple tool to allow you to manually send pingbacks and trackbacks to blogs.  Most blogging tools do this automatically, so it's at best a niche product (which is why it's free...), but at the time I needed something to test my blogs receiving of pingbacks and trackbacks and there were no obvious contenders out there.

 

(Yes, I wrote the code behind this blog instead of getting a free tool to do it.  I always thought blogs were like Jedi lightsabers - you had to make your own, using one someone else built was just not the done thing.)

 

(And another thing - the irony of me having written a tool to send test pingbacks and trackbacks while the pingback and trackback mechanism on my blog is throughly broken isn't lost on me.)

 

Anyway, this person contacted me to tell me that PingTrackBack was being used to send comment spam to blogs.  The idea of using PingTrackBack for such nefarious ends never occurred to me - it's not that I didn't know such spam existed, it's that I figured they'd have a scripted mechanism to do it instead of the multiple clicks and button presses PingTrackBack requires.

 

I mean, PingTrackBack didn't take me long to write - it's a simple enough tool and the pigback and trackback APIs are all public.  Anyone with an ounce of programming ability could have a scripted version that reads in the spam and a (huge) list of blog sites and churns through them all.  I just figured that was how it was done.

 

But apparently not.  Now someone else has noticed the same thing.

 

Arse.

 

The problem is that the tool is already out there.  That's the reason I didn't immediately pull the download from my site - the spammers apparently already had it, so removing it wouldn't do any good.

 

So, my quandry is: what do I do about PingTrackBack?  I'll be using it myself to get my pingbacks and trackbacks working again soon, but should I remove the download from the site?  That'll stop anyone else getting it from me and abusing it (though I'm sure it'll still be available on the web somewhere).  However it'll also stop those folks who - like me - have a legitimate use for the tool.

 

Any thoughts or ideas?  Please?  Let me know.