‘trackback’ is a neat concept: You put a link in a blog post and the blogging software (wordpress in my case) will try to notify that link that there is some comment / info about it on this page.
Of course it only get’s abused by spammers. I turned active trackbacks off, so that posts get submited quicker.
Then I turned trackback as a target off in the workpress preferences under “Options” “Comments”.
This will change the default for new posts not to allow ‘pings’ which in this case seem to be synonym for trackback.
However older posts are still pingable / trackable etc. Instead of clicking 581 times on some check box I changed the
status of those past posts via mysql:
update wp_posts set ping_status = 'closed' ;
will do the trick.