Maria’s Guides

A problem resolved becomes a new problem to resolve.

A while back, I complained that the ping and trackback features on my site wouldn’t work. I could get trackbacks and pingbacks, but I couldn’t send them. I even wrote a TrackBack Troubleshooting post about it which has become one of the most widely read posts on my site.

A while later, I moved my blogs to GoDaddy.com. Immediately, the trackback/pingback feature began working. And it’s been working ever since.

Trouble is, when I refer to a older blog entry in my own blog from a new blog entry, the new entry pings the old one, thus creating a trackback “comment.” The comments are ugly and relatively meaningless. Yes, they do provide a forward link to the new and related content, but they also appear in my recent comments list, thus making it look as if I’m the only one who ever comments on my posts. (Not true, but it certainly feels that way sometimes.) And I’m not convinced that the forward link is necessary.

So today I searched the help forums at WordPress.org to see if there was a solution. The answer appeared in a topic titled “How do I stop links to other posts in same weblog producing a pingback?”

There were actually several answers. The simplest was to omit the domain name from the link, creating a relative path:

To summarise, when linking to your own posts, use a relative path, not the full path.

So instead of

I wrote this yesterday

Use this:

I wrote this yesterday

Do that, and you won’t get a ping.

Sounds like an easy enough solution.

But my solution of choice was to use the No Self Pings Plugin available from blogwaffe.com:

Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts.

Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments.

So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging.

Two ways to do the same thing. Take your choice.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to delete all the self-pings that have accumulated on this site in the past few months.