First off, turn off accepting pings. Almost no legit folks use them anyway.

What I’ve been doing, in my lazy way, is every time I dump one of the spams into the spam filter, I go back and edit the old page to no longer accept pings. It’s not an instant fix — more will come later — but the window is steadily closing and I’m getting hit with fewer and fewer. (Luckily, I turned off my pings before 2006, so it’s only my older pages getting hit.)

There’s been some new mods coming out to fix this, but none of them seem to be working great. There’s also something allegedly that can be done to turn off pings globally via MySQL, but in the wake of rebuilding my computer, I haven’t gotten around to bookmarking that page again. (If you decide to globally deactivate pings that way for your blog, could you do the same to my two as well, please?)

This basically is another good argument for having good spyware protection, though.