When I post something, almost immediately I receive a comment pending moderation. It says something like:

“[name of the post I just made] « Obscure Gems [link to the post]
[string of numbers.numbers.numbers]
Submitted on 2012/09/21 at 9:46 pm [a time I wasn’t online. In fact, that hasn’t even happened yet in my timezone]
[...] touching, war |Leave a comment » I have some history with this book. (Like how I thought Maximum Ride was about a boy on a roller coaster for no apparent reason until I actually picked it up.) When I [...]”

Everything between “[…]” and “[…]” is a snippet, a cutting, apparently completely random, of the post I’d just made. It starts in the middle of the tags! That doesn’t even make sense (unless it’s coded in a way I really don’t understand, but I don’t really want to figure that out now). It’s possible that this only happens to posts I’ve saved as drafts. But not necessarily.

I just have the standard, free option. I haven’t paid any money and as far as I can tell have nothing fancy aside from the theme and the background. It’s possible the theme is relevant, but again, I don’t think so.

Has anybody seen this before? Can you help me? :)

Well it depends. If you look at the screen capture it looks like the trackback was sent the first time around when I only used one URL. In that case I did not append the /trackback so this is the experiment I tried:
I sent it this way:
http://www.agilegeoscience.com/journal/2011/8/2/visual-crossplotting.html/trackback
from this post:
http://mycarta.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/visualization-tips-for-geoscientists-matlab/
And I sent it this way:
http://www.agilegeoscience.com/journal/2011/8/2/visual-crossplotting.html
from this post:
http://mycarta.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/visualization-tips-for-geoscientists-surfer/
SInce I know the folks who rite the agilegeoscience blog I asked them if they got anything. (As far as they know) they did not received either.

So I think I will just drop it. The gains are too marginal as absurdoldbird pointed out, and the trouble too much.
Thank to both for reading along.

Other than that, two things:
You could try doing a search on Google, just in case someone has reported a similar problem and found a solution to it. This gives faster results than searching on the forums themselves. Put this into Google search (with the spaces, colons and double quotes where I've put them):-

site:en.forums.wordpress.com "put your keyword or phrase here"

and put anything you can think of that relates to the problem, into the double quotes. if you need to add more, leave a space and then add it in another pair of double quotes. That should bring up relevant posts in the forum. Alternatively, use

site:wordpress.com to search the whole site, and/or put "wordpress.com" to search only for results applicable to blogs here.

The other thing I wanted to say is this: if your main reason for wanting to use trackbacks is to bring in traffic to your blog, then there are better ways to do it as not everyone will click a trackback anyway (some people think it's spam or blogs self-advertising themselves). I have an archive of posts I did on a previous blog that are designed for people who want to attract more readers, that you might find useful:

http://blogginghelpfornewbies.wordpress.com/

I understand it may be a lot of work and end up wasted, but there may be that one good trackback that will bring back traffic.

;-)
Thanks
Matteo

By the way, you don't need to put any wordpress.com blogs in there, they are pinged automatically. But if the blog you're pinging (with or without a trackback) has them disenabled, then they won't show in their blog comments. Also a lot of bloggers delete trackbacks.

Matteo

Matteo

http://en.support.wordpress.com/comments/trackbacks/

and there's an old thread here that has info that's probably still valid, particularly the last comment:

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/what-is-the-difference-between-a-permalink-url-and-a-trackback-url?replies=11

Is this normal and will the trackbacks be sent all the same?
Thank you,
Matteo

By giving credit I meant more than a link, but I completely understand what you are saying. As I mentioned up above, I have had a few of my articles stolen in there entirety and posted elsewhere. Thankfully when I contacted the site owners they were kind of enough to remove them.

Whether content is worth money or not it's somebody's hard work and should not be stolen, trust me I understand that.

absurdoldbird's link above directed me to timethief's site which explains that. As well after I had posted this I did more research on re-blogging as well and realized the site's in which I had found with whole articles, must either have permission or are doing something they shouldn't.

Thanks again for all of your help.

Doing what you propose is illegal UNLESS you have the blogger's permission in writing. My writing, for instance, is worth a fair bit of money and I could sue you if you did that to me. And if I had to, I would.

Reposting the work of others on your site, in its entirety, even with a link back is not "giving credit" it's stealing. It's like going into someone else's house and taking out their stove, fridge, bathtub and living room furniture because you like it and putting it in your house with signs "FROM THOSE GUYS OVER THERE". Not good enough. Not legal. Not acceptable.

What you CAN do legally and ethically is take a snippet of someone else's post, a paragraph or so, and link to the rest of the post.