Pinging Update Services

  • I am doing some fact checking on an article about optimal WordPress ping setup and usage in v.3.5. Could one of the WP developers verify a few things for me, please?

    First, how does WP 3.5 handle pinging of repeated post edits? I found conflicting information on www.remarpro.com.

    @ipstenu replied a year ago to a WP forum support question on excessive post editing and pinging issues in which she stated, “If you edit posts a lot, then yeah, you should turn off pinging.”

    However, Chip Bennett, over on his cbnet Ping Optimizer plugin page recently stated (2012-12-20) that, based on information from @otto42, “When you edit an existing post, it won’t send any unnecessary ping to ping services and saves your blog from getting banned by such services.” Because, “WordPress intelligently fires pings when a post is edited, by keeping track of previous successful pings and not re-pinging them.”

    If Chip’s statements are correct, could you elaborate in a bit more detail how WP ‘intelligently fires pings’? And, in what instances WP will re-ping an edited post?

    Also, why doesn’t WP 3.5 use Weblogs.com’s published standard for extended pings and include the exact post URL of new and updated posts when pinging update services? There is a two year old, unresolved ticket, #14902 (weblogUpdates.extendedPing does not implement standard), about this issue.

    Finally, do you know if Ping-o-matic’s API supports Weblog’s standard? The manual submission on the homepage clearly does not, but what about their API? Several ping plugins support the standard, but if Ping-o-matic doesn’t, then it is ultimately a worthless feature for many people.

    Thanks for your help.

    Regards,
    J Greene

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    You’re conflating different things that have the same name. You’re not the first, I believe Chip did the same to some extent in his description there.

    There’s pingbacks, where I link to your blog in a post and you get a comment on your blog telling you that I talked about you.

    And then there’s XML-RPC Pings, which is for services like Ping-O-Matic and such.

    – Pingbacks only happen once per URL, per post.
    – XML-RPC pings happen every time (and should in fact do just that)

    I grant you that this is confusing because “pingbacks” also go through an XML-RPC door, however they are still different and operate differently.

    How pingbacks work:

    1. Editing a post causes the post to get the “_pingme” metadata added to it, and causes WordPress to schedule the do_pings action to be run from the wp-cron system.

    2. Later, wp-cron will run and fire the do_pings action. This causes the do_all_pings function to be run.

    3. do_all_pings will load up the post with the _pingme meta key, and run the pingback function on it.

    4. The pingback function calls the get_pung function, which loads the “pinged” column from the posts table for that post.

    Basically, any time a given URL is pinged for a specific post, that url gets saved into the pinged column, and then the pingback function checks that before pinging it again. So only URLs get pinged for each post one time, saved, and remembered.

    Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    Oh, as for weblog’s standard and such, it is my personal opinion that XML-RPC pings are completely worthless, whether you’re using Ping-O-Matic, the new standard, the old standard, or anything of the sort. That’s old tech, nobody uses it, nobody needs to use it, and in point of fact I personally turn off XML-RPC pinging on all my sites.

    I think we should remove it from WordPress entirely and get rid of Ping-o-matic. I realize that not everybody agrees with me on this point. ??

    Thread Starter JGreene

    (@jgreene)

    Thank you for your detailed answers, they are much appreciated.

    My main concern is with XML-RPC pinging every time a post is edited, which I understand is normally a good thing. The problem comes in for “compulsive editors” who can get penalized for excessive pinging of posts. I have found newbie bloggers to be particularly prone to editing their new posts 5, 10, 20 times in a short time frame, trying to get them just perfect. Because of this I have been recommending that they either turn off XML-RPC pinging altogether, or use a ping management plugin, to avoid any penalties or problems.

    Thanks again for all of your help.

    Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    In the case of the XMLRPC ping-to-update services, such as Ping-o-matic et al, I am pretty certain (about 98%) that it does not make the slightest bit of difference.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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