Local pingbacks not working

  • I make extensive use of self-referential pingbacks to aid researchers in datamining my site (they’re a great way to reverse-navigate up a tree of footnotes to find related articles). Unfortunately the pingbacks only appear maybe half the time when I post new articles. This has been going on for some time. I’m running 5.0.2. All the plugins and themes were up to date until 2 days ago or so.

    1) I realize this is a frequent issue but there doesn’t yet seem to be a solution, at least one that works for me. Is there a workaround?
    2) What I can I do to scan old articles and force missing pingbacks to happen?

    Thanks for any help!!

    • This topic was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by winkelr.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    The pingback routine is not very robust. AFAIK, if sending a pingback fails, WP just gives up. If there is any communication glitch, the pingback request may not get through. Even though your pingbacks are local, the request still goes out to the Internet, then returns as though the target server was truly remote.

    There’s not a good workaround. I suppose one could develop a custom pingback routine that keeps retrying a send request on error, at least for a little while. It still must give up after some number of tries.

    It’s conceivable to develop some sort of pingback repair script that queries for local post references in post content, then checks the target post to see if a pingback comment exists. If not, one could re-send a pingback using the pingback() function. But since this is all local, it’s more straight forward for the script to simply insert a comment that looks exactly like a pingback.

    It can take a long time for such a script to check all posts, so you would need some logic that chunks the posts checked into manageable size, then repeatedly checks another chunk until no more posts with missing pingback comments are left.

    If you keep having trouble with pingbacks, the script would need to be re-run on a periodic basis to keep all comments up to date.

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