How Will We Know If People Love Us?

I’m not the best at html, but, to use a technical term, trackbacks are now foobar. All I did was move the code for trackbacks on the main page from the bottom of a post to the top, and now the trackback page is complete inaccessible… even from the individual entry page where I didn’t mess with the template. I can’t even be sure, though, that me moving things on the main index broke it all.
Anyone know how to debug this? Remember, the more time I spend on technical issues, the less time I have for playing videogames writing funny.
UPDATE: Last trackback (that was not erased; was dealing with a lot of trackback spam recently useing MT-Blacklist) was on the 16th to this post.
UPDATE 2: Explanation of foobar.

10 Comments

  1. I can’t really tell you how to debug it, but I would be glad to give you a hand with it. Since you won’t (and I can’t blame you) want to give a strange stranger admin access to your site, you could e-mail the source for your template to me. I’d be glad to see if I can help.

  2. Dang, Dave in Texas beat me to it. Frank, it’s FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition—That’s the PG version) A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, eh?
    BTW, Dave in Texas, what’s TARFU? And don’t tell me it’s German.

  3. Adam, I’m not Dave but TARFU stands for: Things Are Really Fouled Up.
    Perhaps to make up for not being Dave (even though I’m in Texas) I’ll toss you another cryptic military acronym…
    BOHICA, Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.

  4. Frank,
    Do a search for /cgi-bin/> and you may find the problem. My guess is that you will find a Quote or Apostrophe has been left off somewhere, thus causing the Trackback window to look for a /cgi-bin/> directory instead of /cgi-bin.
    Sorry to the rest of you if i got to geek there.
    It’s nice to know by the way that someone besides myself uses foo & bar for example variables.

  5. Ok..I know what is happening, but i’m not sure why its happening. The trackback link is pointing to
    http://www.imao.us/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=2751
    but it is being redirected to
    http://www.imao.us/cgi-bin/%3e?__mode=view&entry_id=2751
    Somewhere on the server the mt-tb.cgi is being changed. It could be an url rewrite setup in apache or something more sinister, but a fix you could try is this:
    1) rename mt-tb.cgi to something else with a .cgi extension
    2) edit the file called mt.cfg
    2.1) find the line #TrackbackScript somethingorother.cgi
    2.2) remove the # symbol from the front and change somethingorother.cgi to the new name for mt-tb.cgi
    Doing this will “sort of” protect you from trackback spam as well as hopefully fixing the problem. If it persists, I’ll look into it a bit further.

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