interaction with ping/trackback

[mlinksva]

This might be more than one issue:

• should sending ping/trackbacks be disabled if this plugin activated? (documentation?)
• wordpress ping/trackbacks keep track of those already sent; ought this be duplicated or reused for webmentions?

[pfefferle]

should sending ping/trackbacks be disabled if this plugin activated? (documentation?)

Good point!

wordpress ping/trackbacks keep track of those already sent; ought this be duplicated or reused for web mentions?

This is actually a feature. If the text changes, the plugin sends the "mention" again, so the pinged site could update the "comment" http://indiewebcamp.com/comments#Update_a_comment

[mlinksva]

Thanks for the pointer, I'll read and understand thoroughly before reporting any more issues. :)

I suspect #8 is actually about the second bullet in this issue. Perhaps if ping/trackbacks are present, they should be updated/superseded by a new webmention, just as if they had been webmentions?

[willnorris]

regarding the first point, I certainly don't think we'd want to disable sending pings/trackbacks entirely. For the time being, I expect most sites that I link to to support only pingback/trackback, so I wouldn't want to lose the ability to ping them.

However, I'm wondering if webmention should respect the "Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article" option on the Discussion Settings page. If I've disabled sending ping/trackbacks, does it also reason that I don't want to send webmentions? Maybe not, given your first point (where you specifically want webmention but not ping/trackback). So maybe the solution is a new checkbox on the Discussion Settings page, similar to this existing option?

I still wonder if we shouldn't have a simple way to disable re-sending webmentions on post updates. I get why we do it, but it also makes it really annoying when I'm just trying to fix a simple typo, and it takes 30 seconds to save the post because it's waiting for all the webmention posts.

[pfefferle]

The current version respects the enable/disable pingbacks settings and this is ok for me, but feel free to add a separate setting for webmentions, I am ok with that too.

To your second point... WordPress seems to use a weird pseudo-threading (with wp-cron) for sending pingbacks... Perhaps we should use the do_pings or pre_ping hook instead of the save_post.

[pfefferle]

The huge delay on every save is a really good point btw!

[willnorris]

yeah, just looking at the description in the codex for do_all_pings, it sounds like exactly what we should be using:

Perform all pingbacks, enclosures, trackbacks, and send to pingback services.

[pfefferle]

But this action doesn't have any params, so we have to add some kind of a flag to the post-table (or add the id to the options table) to be able to use it...

[willnorris]

ugh, okay. I hadn't looked at it that closely.

[pfefferle]

The core uses the to_ping field in the post table for that... Not sure if we also can use it for the webmention plugin.

[pfefferle]

So, the latest version now uses the do_pings hook, that means all mentions are sent asynchron and the save process should be much faster. For a better flood handling (if someone links to multiple pages on the same domain), the plugin re-cues the WebMentions that are returning a 403 error ( @snarfed i think this is better than disabling the flood control completely )

The plugin also sets the punged urls correctly, to tell the core pingback functionality to ignore these urls and to not ping them again. The WebMention plugin itself ignores this field and pings also on updates.

I am curious about your feedback!

[snarfed]

you all are the WordPress experts, but this sounds great to me, especially the 403 instead of triggering flood control. I suspect we may still see flood control kick in occasionally, but probably much less. thanks!

[pfefferle]

Oh, you are right... I only saw it from the WordPress client perspective... If an other client sends more than one webmention at a time, we still have the problem... Ok, then back to work :)

[pfefferle]

I will close this, because all tasks of the original issue are fixed. Let's create new issues if you think we should handle trackbacks and webmentions separately.