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The Problem with Trackback

You would have to be insane to enable Trackback on a corporate blog. Look
at the links at the bottom of Mena Trott’s post about the new licensing terms for Movable Type 3.0.

The mob has spoken, and it’s publicly viewable on the company site.

This entry was written by PJ Doland, posted on May 13, 2004 at 8:53 am, filed under Blogging, Web Development. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

10 Comments

  1. R Dan
    Posted May 13, 2004 at 8:58 am | Permalink

    Indeed, as a user of MoveableType I’ve been reading the links at the bottom with much mirth.

    Well, as much mirth as I have, now that I’ve got to replace the software my website’s built upon.

  2. Les
    Posted May 13, 2004 at 11:22 am | Permalink

    I will give Six Apart credit for that much. It takes some serious confidence to allow links to articles critical of your business decisions to sit right under your big announcements.

    Alas that’s about all the credit I can give them anymore.

  3. Josette
    Posted May 13, 2004 at 8:29 pm | Permalink

    tremendous. that’s the biggest argument NOT to use trackback i’ve ever seen.

  4. Hashim
    Posted May 13, 2004 at 11:44 pm | Permalink

    this has got to be an embarrasing day for that company.

  5. nando
    Posted May 14, 2004 at 12:27 pm | Permalink

    On the contrary, the only good thought about Movable Tyep today has come about after seeing all those nasty trackbacked comments in Mena’s weblog. I know Microcrap would never do it, but I don’t buy any of their products, guess why!

  6. Jeff Medcalf
    Posted May 14, 2004 at 5:48 pm | Permalink

    I agree with nando: this is a plus. The company is likely to revise their decisions based on this public shaming. How is that bad?

  7. annabloom
    Posted May 15, 2004 at 10:16 am | Permalink

    fair balls to them to keep these trackbacks on the page. i guess now that is called a publishing platform they feel it is appropriate to pay for it (does it have the power of mambo or typo3?). anyway, we probably will see a few migrations soon. wordpress (http://wordpress.org/) could be a candidate. does not support multiple weblogs (yest) though.

  8. Mark
    Posted May 15, 2004 at 7:29 pm | Permalink

    Depending on your needs and your personal level of geekiness, I’ve always been happy with Nucleus (http://www.nucleuscms.org). It’s PHP based, which is nice, since CGI is such a pain. It doesn’t have a lot of fancy features, but since you can include PHP files in your layouts, just about anything is possible. After a brief flirtation with MoveableType, I settled on it and I love it.

    The bonus is that the Nucleus has a MoveableType import tool.

  9. Shawn Liu
    Posted May 18, 2004 at 2:47 pm | Permalink

    There is a major benefit to this… goof up(?)… at least now 6apart can’t say that this is what their customers want. They can’t make up stories about how this benefits their customers, blah, blah, blah.

  10. Nathan
    Posted May 19, 2004 at 9:36 am | Permalink

    I have to agree with PJ. On the one had I do think the openness is admirable. And the fact that Movable Type allows the trackbacks says allot about the basic nature the company has. However, if it were not for the trackbacks and seeing the fact that many other people held the same concern as I did about the new license, I might have considered waiting 4 or 5 months to see what type of free version they might produce and if I could get around the license issues. However, that is not the case and from the trackbacks I have more faith that if I were to break out of movable type now i wouldn’t be loosing much because it seems many other people are doing the same. So from a Business point of view, unmoderated trackbacks are not a good idea.

7 Trackbacks

  1. By Teller pl�µksib: fotod, m�µtted, viited on May 13, 2004 at 9:10 am

    MovableType 3.0 + uus litsentsipoliitika

    MovableType lasi vÃ?¤lja versiooni 3.0 Developer Edition’i. LÃ?¼hidalt, et 3.0 ei too kaasa suuri uusi funktsionaalsuse edasiarendusi, vaid pigem on Ã?¼mber kirjutatud pÃ?µhi, mis kÃ?µike jooksutab. Robustsemaks ja paremaks. Uued vidinad ja vÃ?µimalused tulevad jÃ?¤…

  2. By Ari Paparo Dot Com on May 13, 2004 at 10:21 am

    Time to Update the PowerPoint

    Anyone with a blog is writing about Movable Type’s crazy new pricing scheme so I thought I’d chime in. As…

  3. By Life as it Comes on May 13, 2004 at 12:50 pm

    You can always tell…

    Wasn’t there a poll on the MT website a while back that asked how many weblogs the average person had? I’m pretty sure there was, and I’m pretty sure the majority said < 3. Usually when freeware sites start doing stuff like that, it’s a pretty good …

  4. By gamewhore on May 13, 2004 at 6:03 pm

    “And as the ship sank, the violins played on”

    You can’t buy advertising like this. WordPress posted a note expressing their best wishes to SixApart in the wake of their new licensing scheme. The best part is, they sent a trackback to the official blog entry of the mess….

  5. By Blethers.com on May 14, 2004 at 9:53 am

    Six apart: you’ve got to admire their cojones

    Announcing a change in the pricing model for Movable Type on Mena’s blog and sitting back to watch the critical trackbacks come pouring in (348 last time I looked, mostly from people making the somewhat contradictory comment that they want MT to become…

  6. By nuggets of a lesser gold on May 14, 2004 at 6:44 pm

    Money doesn’t buy you logic.

    This reminds me of the whole Apple iTools/.Mac thing. But at least Apple make other stuff. When instead a company has only one product, and plays that $0-to-$90 trick out

  7. By G'Day Mate - Reviews! on May 16, 2004 at 8:36 pm

    Blog Roundup

    Here we are back with a new Blog Roundup and for the first time in memory, we actually have a single theme for the week. Every single blog that was randomly selected has been posting about the same thing this…