Make WordPress Core

Opened 9 years ago

Last modified 7 years ago

#32653 new enhancement

Improve Linkback Presentation

Reported by: dshanske's profile dshanske Owned by:
Milestone: Awaiting Review Priority: normal
Severity: normal Version:
Component: Pings/Trackbacks Keywords: has-patch 2nd-opinion
Focuses: Cc:

Description

The current default presentation for linkbacks(pingbacks and trackbacks) does not encourage their use. Currently,the presentation looks something like this:

[…] A pingback example. […]

People have complained that the utility of linkbacks has been overshadowed by their use as a vector for DDOS attacks and spam.

The recent improvements to Press This show we can do better in presentation of linked content.

The pingback specification is a bit vague in terms of presentation suggestions, stating: "Bob's blog also retrieves other data required from the content of Alice's new post, such as the page title, an extract of the page content surrounding the link to Bob's post, any attributes indicating which language the page is in, and so forth."

I am proposing by default we switch to a default with improved readability and more consistent with the user experience on other websites.

For example, a basic linkback should display the author/site name, the name of the linked content, etc, rather than the summary, and that information stored as comment meta. This would look more like a citation.

That display could be (optionally) progressively enhanced by other factors, for example, page markup such as MicroFormats, Microdata, or OpenGraph(popularized by Facebook), etc to add a better experience if the linked site supports it.

The basic point is that linkbacks are unusable by people in their current form, but the idea of letting people know you linked to their content is a good one. It encourages conversation and interaction. I think we just need to make it a better experience. Otherwise, everyone just turns it off.

I'm aware the above could be done by a plugin(and may start as a 'feature' plugin), however I think the basic structure of this change belongs in core.

Attachments (3)

34141.4.diff (7.9 KB) - added by dshanske 8 years ago.
Based on the code written for #34141, this goes a bit farther.
34141.4.2.diff (7.9 KB) - added by dshanske 8 years ago.
Minor error
32653.2.diff (7.9 KB) - added by dshanske 8 years ago.
Tested this Time.

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (8)

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #core by dshanske. View the logs.


8 years ago

@dshanske
8 years ago

Based on the code written for #34141, this goes a bit farther.

@dshanske
8 years ago

Minor error

#2 @dshanske
8 years ago

  • Keywords has-patch 2nd-opinion added

I was working on a patch for #34141 and decided to try taking it even further, looking at alternative pingback handling code among other things. This needs further testing, but it simplifies the pingback rendering to fewer lines and the much simpler, "This post was mentioned on ."

Wanted to see if there were any opinions before I went further in refining and testing this.

@dshanske
8 years ago

Tested this Time.

#3 @dshanske
8 years ago

The next part I would propose after going for a simpler text presentation is to build in support for avatars. Basically, now that WordPress officially supports site icons, we have a place to get images, to turn Linkbacks on sites that support the possible enhancements into a visual presentation similar to the Jetpack like feature.

That would leave us with an improved text presentation for backward compatibility and a visual presentation going forward.

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #design by dshanske. View the logs.


8 years ago

#5 @swissspidy
7 years ago

@dshanske I think this relates very well to #37938 and the recent discussion about having nice link previews.

Using oEmbed to display the sites sending the pingbacks is certainly possible, but with 10 sites having differently styled embeds, this wouldn't really look nice. However, with using Open Graph and the like, well…

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