Sunday 16 February 2003

The pinger, the pingee, and the duplicate ping

Phil Ringnalda explains something that I’ve been wondering about ever since I enabled TrackBack: why does my Movable Type occasionally ping someone’s entry twice and, conversely, why do I sometimes get duplicate TrackBack pings for one of my posts? (I’ve had a couple of emails from MT users apologizing about this.)

I’ve followed Phil’s advice and modified my mt.cfg file:

PingTimeout 30

Unfortunately there’s no mt.cfg file setting for reducing the time one spends writing blog entries.

Permalink | TrackBack (1)

Comments

Funny - Brad Choate suggested the same change to me today...

Posted by: john on 16 February 2003 at 03:58 PM

I can explain how I pinged one of your posts twice. I had automatic trackback enabled. So when I saved a post with the url from your site you got the first ping. I later modified the post adding a link to another site when I resaved the entry the automatic feature pinged not only the new url I had added but yours a second time.

Posted by: Norm Jenson on 16 February 2003 at 06:22 PM

Norm, that's almost certainly because the first ping didn't register -- for the reason Phil explains.

Posted by: Jonathon on 16 February 2003 at 10:03 PM

So let me see if I have this right. I post the entry MT indicates that it has pinged the site, but MT shows no indication if it doesn't receive the acknowledgement, and further MT is designed so that if it had pinged a site successfully receiving the acknowledgement and I modified the post adding another url and saved it would ping the new url but not reping the other url.

Posted by: Norm Jenson on 17 February 2003 at 03:04 AM

That's it, Norm. Just as, when you publish, a post MT only pings Weblogs.com, blo.gs, and movabletype.org (the latter, if you've donated) the first time. Earlier versions used to send another set of pings when you modified and republished a post but they fixed that a few versions ago.

Posted by: Jonathon on 17 February 2003 at 07:42 AM

welldone ! the pingtimeout seems ok. one weird thing (but not a real problem) is that when i re-ask the individual page to see if my ping was really received, this page indicates "Tackback (0)" and the post on your main page indicates "Trackback (1)".

Posted by: Philippe on 18 February 2003 at 07:35 PM

Philippe, I'm not quite sure what you mean. Both my main page and the individual archive page show TrackBack (1) -- referring to your TrackBack ping.

Posted by: Jonathon on 18 February 2003 at 09:46 PM

Only my fault : cache problem ;) Evrything is ok now.

Posted by: Philippe on 19 February 2003 at 06:53 AM

This discussion is now closed. My thanks to everyone who contributed.

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