[Plugin: Google XML Sitemaps] problem while notifying Ask.com

I was just told that we’ve had the problem for the last several days.

Clicking “View result” shows that submission.ask.com is not accessible.

same problem here

Same problem here too

I have the same problem, and it happens on several different sites running different versions of wordpress. Ask.com -never- works.

Same issue here, has given me this error since I installed the plugin 3 weeks ago. All other search engine notifications seem to work fine.

I checked the debug output of the plugin, and also the URL submission syntax on ask.com.

The plugin URL encodes more characters than the ask.com example

ie, plugin generates

https://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.contoso.com%2Fsitemap%2Fsitemap.xml.gz

I used

https://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.contoso.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml.gz

I submitted this URL manually and noticed it took a while (10+ seconds) to come back with a result.

I’m thinking this particular submission may need a longer timeout for the ask.com response, not sure if URL encoding matters