Farewell to trackback pings

I just got back online, after a few days (literally) offline in Boston. The trackback spammers had a little celebration while I was away:

All of those entries in the Inbox and the Spam folder are comment spam and trackback spam notifications — the vast majority of 'em are trackbacks. The MovableType UI, at least in the version I'm currently using, doesn't give me an easy way to verify which trackback pings are from legitimate blogs and which ones are from scumbag spammers, so I've turned off the trackback permission for new postings going forward. When you have about a 400:1 ratio of spam to legitimate pings, it's time to close down that attack method altogether.