[wp-hackers] RE: Trac #2361 (TB + PB to the same blog causes onlythePB to show)

[Andy Staines]

Might I be permitted to ask what may be a dumb question here as I  
have been following this and am somewhat confused. Sorry to break  
into the discussion  though.

Reading up in the codex, I understand a 'pingback' to occur when  
another site places a link in a post to an item on my site. That's  
what the codex suggests. Am I correct? My question is - am I supposed  
to be aware of this link being made? Is something supposed to happen  
at my end? because I have been using WP for just over a year and I  
see lots of people putting links to items of mine in their posts  but  
the only thing I see is the 'Incoming Links' on the dashboard. I do  
get the odd 'Trackback' show up in my comments list. Am I supposed to  
get 'Pingbacks' too? If not - what is the point of them?

I know this is not the right place but it's been bugging me for a  
while now - the not knowing bit :)

Andy




> Well said Guru. It should be clear that the issue here is not that  
> WP should use trackbacks instead of pingbacks.  The issue is that  
> trackbacks should be allowed when the author manually declares a  
> trackback is preferred.
>
> I do agree that pingbacks have a technically better (easier to  
> process) specification than trackbacks*.  But if the destination  
> handles both equally well, AFAIAC, it's the end appearance is  
> really important.  If anyone cares to add anything (relevant) to my  
> understanding of these two methodologies, I'd be glad to listen.
>
> IMHO, there are situations where trackbacks have an obvious  
> advantage in WordPress because they use the Excerpt field for the  
> content sent to the other blog.  No matter how contextual a  
> pingback's automatically extracted paragraph maybe, it will not be  
> better than a hand customized summary.
>
> Even when the excerpt is automatically created for the trackback,  
> there is a good chance that the trackback's excerpt will be more  
> meaningful than the extraction made by the pingback.