Is This True, or BS?

I’m going to setup a fake email address, download it and have a look at the code. I’ll let you know if I find anything odd.

First off it looks like it signs you up to spam mailing list, so be-careful of that.

I’ve had a quick look at the code. It doesn’t look like it sends any personal information to them. Although there are some things in the code that seem a bit odd.

It looks like it writes out a debug log to wp-content/post-schedule-ping-optimizer.log, I’m not sure of the contents but you should check that before using it.

Also it looks like you need to setup a real cron for the pinging to occur. So you’d need to have access to do this on your server.

I personally don’t use WordPress (not for the reasons stated on that spammy site), but if I did, I wouldn’t use that plugin.

The diagnosis (pinging when editing, pinging now for future posts) is basically – true.
I don’t know who the plugin author is.
But there also is a plugin by a well-known member of our community: Skippy.
https://www.skippy.net/blog/category/wordpress/plugins/wp-cron/