WordPress tries to pingback itself when editing article linking to other on same site

[david72]

Spurious comments are appearing for moderation in my WordPress installation.

I'm not certain that this is the cause, but I suspect that WordPress is trying to send pingbacks to 'itself' when a user edits an article on my WordPress system which includes a link to another article which is also a part of the same WordPress installation.

Presumably WordPress looks for links in the article to send pingbacks to, but appears unable to recognise when it is pingingback itself, rather than another site. This is presumably not desirable behaviour(!).

These presumed pingbacks appear as comments requiring moderation (if comment moderation is on), which is confusing to novice users (such as myself!). It is not immediately clear from the comment as displayed for moderation that it *is* a pingback, which led me to worry that either I was being cracked or that I had unleashed some major bug(!), before realising what was actually happening.

As a hopeful workaround, I have disabled trackbacks/pingbacks for now, which I hope will avoid this problem. However, this means that I can't trackback/pingback other sites (although this isn't a major concern for me).

[zamoose]

This, in my experience, is desirable behavior. It allows articles to automatically display other articles/posts on the same install that link back to said post, obviating the need for "related posts"-type plugins in some cases.

[markjaquith]

This is desired behavior. A plugin could be used to stop this behavior.

I would use the pre_ping hook: ​http://wphooks.flatearth.org/hooks/pre_ping/

[mdawaffe]

david72, ​http://blogwaffe.com/2006/10/04/421/

[david72]

OK, I accept that this is a feature that more advanced users may find useful. :)
(And thanks for acknowledging that this was not a bug or cracking attempt.)

However, I think it would be useful if the fact that WordPress pingsback itself, and would therefore cause these mysterious comments to appear, were documented somewhere in the new user documentation (even a brief explanatory note in the control panel). As a fairly new user of WordPress, I was genuinely puzzled and somewhat alarmed by this behaviour until I worked out what seemed to be happening. People new to blog software (who probably don't even know what trackbacks and pingbacks are, and that included me until recently) shouldn't encounter "nasty surprises" until they become more experienced and actually start hacking at their WordPress setup properly! WordPress is a very user- and novice- friendly piece of software, so this does come as a genuine unexpected surprise to the unwary.

I would like to reiterate my suggestion that, if the pingback structure allows such metadata to be carried, the fact that these "mysterious comments" *are* pingbacks should be made very clear to the user when entering the comment moderation control panel, as new users are unable to recognise what a pingback looks like. As I said, from their brief and cryptic appearance, seemingly sampling snippets of my articles, at first I genuinely feared they were some kind of automated comment spam or crack attempt, as there was nothing to indicate their genuinely non-malevolent nature or that they were pingbacks.

I forgot to note in my initial report that I had disabled commenting entirely, and I would cordially suggest that in this case, attempting to self-pingback is, if not a bug, at least an undesired feature (as the site admin has clearly specified that they don't want to receive *any* comments), although perhaps it is not possible for the pingback mechanism to be aware that the site does not accept comments at all before attempting to send?

[Viper007Bond]

Disabling comments does not disable pings. They are entirely separate. Infact, they each have their own option to enable or disable on the write page.

And my vote is against changing any of this behavior. If you have the auto-ping option on, then it should auto ping URLs in the post -- regardless of where they reside.

Anyway, please don't reopen this. This is the intended behavior, not a bug, and so it doesn't need a ticket. You're more than welcome to continue discussing this though, but the best place for that is the ​wp-hackers mailing list. :)

This PR is a commit prep. It applies PR #3205 on top of current trunk. The goal is to see if PHPUnit test failures are still occurring while isolating the scope of work into a separate PR for exploration if tests fail.

Trac ticket:

Committed via https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/54162.