I spend most of a day trying to figure out why I can’t send trackbacks from my blog.
If you follow this blog, you’ll know I’m working on a book about WordPress with Miraz Jordan. We split the chapters down the middle, with me getting the first half and Miraz getting the second. One of my chapters covers comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks, three features of WordPress that allow feedback and interactivity between blogs and readers.
On my two WordPress-powered sites, the comments feature works fine. A bit too fine, in fact, as the sites quickly became victims of comment spam. Fortunately, Dr. Dave makes a great comment spam prevention plugin for WordPress called Spam Karma and that catches about 99% of the spam aimed at my two sites. I can easily catch the rest using WordPress’s built-in moderation tools. I’ll be covering all this information in detail in Chapter 4 of our book.
I never really experimented much with the trackback and pingback features. Rather than going into a long, detailed explanation of what these features are, if you’re interested (and can’t wait for the book), you can visit the WordPress Trackback Tutorial on Optiniche.com.
One thing I will point out here is that pingbacks are automatic notification of a blog that your blog refers to it. For example, so far I’ve provided links to two specific blog entries (one on Dr. Dave’s site and one on Optiniche). Because WordPress is configured to automatically notify compatible sites when you link to them, a comment should be created for blog entry I linked to, providing an excerpt from my post and other information. You can see an example on this site from Miraz in the comments on this post. Even the link I just created to my own blog entry should result in a pingback to my blog.
Unfortunately, none of this is working. And yesterday, I spent a good part of the day troubleshooting to find out why. After all, it’s difficult to write about something when you can’t get it to work right.
Don’t get me wrong — I know exactly how it should work. I’ve probably read more about the trackback feature in the past two days than most WordPress users read in their lifetimes. And I tortured Miraz yesterday by asking her to trackback and pingback to my site to make sure I could receive these. (I can.) I just can’t send them.
Oddly enough, I attempted to create a trackback from my demo WordPress.com blog. It appeared to go to its destination, but it never showed up there.
In troubleshooting, I found two possible problems mentioned in the WordPress Codex, both of which will require a visit to the server where the sites reside.
First, there’s some indication that the pings might be “stuck” in a queue, resulting in an endless loop while WordPress tries to send them. I’m not so sure about this. It seems to me if that there was some kind of loop thing going on, WordPress would be bogged down by the effort. Yet my two sites seems to perform okay. Still, the cure seems to be to use some MySQL commands to flush out the contents of the to_ping field. Since I don’t think it will hurt anything to do this, I’ll give it a try.
Other people experiencing this same problem claim that this does not help. One person believes it has to do with a blog getting very large and a memory problem resulting. I can believe this with my blogs. Although I only have about 400 entries in each, the entries in this blog tend to be very lengthy. Add to that my love of customization via plugin and you have a very busy WordPress trying to do all kind of things with lots of data. To fix this, I need to visit my server and make some changes to the php.ini file. (I already tried modifying .htaccess, as the article suggests, but that doesn’t appear to help.)
I’m also thinking at this point that it may have something to do with a recently installed plugin. On this site, my automatic database backup stopped working, although it continues to work reliably on wickenburg-az.com.
Am I pushing WordPress too hard? Perhaps. Hopefully I’ll resolve this problem soon so I can back to work.
Oh, and if you have any suggestions for me, please don’t keep them to yourself.
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One small but important quibble: you ought to flag the spam that get past SK2 through SK2′s specific interface, so as to train it better and dramatically reduce further let-through rate… This can be done either by checking them (in the “Approved comment” subscreen of the SK2 Admin screen) and clicking on “Moderate selected”, or even more simply, following the “Flag comment as Spam” link provided at the bottom of the notification email. Similarly, should a false positive ever occur, you strongly ought to “unflag” it through SK2.
As I said, doing so will help fine-tune SK2′s settings automatically and dramatically improve your catching rate.
Cheers.
Greetings, Dr Dave! And thanks for stopping by.
I believe this IS how I’m handling spams that have high karma ratings. Your software makes it extremely easy to do by sending that message with the clickable link. And I do periodically check the caught spam to make sure none of it is non-spam; if it is, I use your interface to bring it back from the spam pile. I’ve also used your interface to “whitelist” an e-mail address that was previously blacklisted. Frankly, I’d be lost without the software — too much comment spam out there. I will definitely be writing about it (and recommending it) in Chapter 4 of our book.
Thanks again for the great software.
The best way to stop spam would be to spend some time in moderating the comments persoanlly rather than relying on any captchas. You can go to the other extreme of not allowing anyone to comment – but then the whole essence of sharing information is lost. At least Yahoo and MSN rewards the commentators with relevant backlinks, so that is a reward which many spammers like to go for.
Unless you have a blog that is regularly attacked by spam, you have no idea how bad the situation is. My first spam attack, within weeks of starting my WordPress blog, consisted of over 300 comments. Manually “moderating” them was not fun. Now imagine dealing with that kind of attack on four blogs. My co-author on the WordPress book, Miraz Jordan, suggested Spam Karma and I’m very glad she did.
With literally THOUSANDS of spam messages sent to this site alone each week, manual moderation would be impossible. Spam Karma has already caught close to 50,000 spam messages on this site since January 2006. I do look at its results a few times a week and so far, it has only flagged one legitimate message as spam. I’ve since adjusted settings and haven’t had that problem again.
Turning on the Captcha feature of Spam Karma is what helps ensure that only REAL messages come through. It does not appear unless the message MIGHT be spam and it seems to weed out the robots.
I also just installed Bad Behavior, which appears to stop robots before they start using system resources. This should prevent database and installation errors that might appear when the server is too busy handling spam requests to handle legitimate ones. It’ll cut down Spam Karma’s workload, too.
I don’t know what you mean by backlinks. Perhaps you can enlighten me?
And the trackback problem I had on this site (the original subject of this post) was fixed when I moved the site to GoDaddy.com’s server.
Maria, Backlinks are needed by seos for ranking in the serps.
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