One of the really nice things about how WordPress handles discussion of your blog posts, is the ability to take the conversation beyond just your own blog. Pingbacks mean that you can track who's talking about you on their own blogs, automatically:

• Sharon writes a blog post
• Tracey writes a blog post linking to Sharon's post
• the blog software leaves a link ("pingback") to Tracey's post automatically in Sharon's comments.

You can control WordPress's pingbacks via Settings > Discussion:

• Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.), sends a pingback to anyone you've linked, and
• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) controls whether other blogs can send pingbacks to you.

Unfortunately pingbacks are a favourite tool of spammers, so if you're finding them to be more trouble than they're worth, that second option allows you to turn them off altogether.

Stop pinging yourself

By default, every time you write a post that links to another of your own posts, WordPress will create a pingback for you. You might like this: it's an easy way to trace related posts, after all. Or you might, like me, link a lot of your own old posts and find the pingbacks annoying and untidy, especially as the pingbacks appear in "recent comments" lists.

Fortunately, it's easy to stop them; No Self Pings is a neat and easy to install plugin that stops your WordPress install pinging itself. Just download it, unzip it (should happen automatically if you're running Windows XP or Vista), upload to wp-content/plugins and activate it via your WP admin. There's nothing to configure and nothing further to do.

Tags: comments, pingback, plugins, Skribit, trackback

Posted by Sue on December 2, 2008 in Plugins, WordPress.