[wp-trac] Re: [WordPress Trac] #2933: Show messages from weblogUpdates.ping/extendedPing

[WordPress Trac]

#2933: Show messages from weblogUpdates.ping/extendedPing
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 Reporter:  c960657      |        Owner:  anonymous
     Type:  enhancement  |       Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal       |    Milestone:           
Component:  XML-RPC      |      Version:           
 Severity:  normal       |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:               |  
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Comment (by c960657):

 Perhaps it is optimistic to think that spammers will care a bit about
 this. But spammers do use Wordpress, at least according to the user agent
 string in the XML-RPC request (about 75% of the hits on my XML-RPC service
 have Wordpress user agents). Of course Wordpress cannot be blamed for
 this, but if Wordpress could somehow alleviate the problem, I think this
 would be a Good Thing. I have two suggestions:
 1. Instead of just warning the user, the service could automatically be
 removed after e.g. 25 unsuccesful pings (this could be fine-tuned so that
 a rejected ping counts more than a server being down or returning a 500
 Server Error).
 2. If the message part of the response contains a specific "magic" string,
 e.g. "DO NOT EVER PING ME AGAIN", this will make Wordpress remove the
 service immediately.

 What do you think of these suggestions? Of course, spammers could just
 reinsert the URLs of the failing services, but hopefully they will realize
 that this will not have any affect.


 But even though it only has limited effect to show the error message on
 the options page, I still think it is worth doing. The specific error
 message may actually be useful to the user (e.g. "your URL should start
 with 'http://'") and at least it allows Good People to stop pinging sites
 that reject pings or have been shut down.

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Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2933>
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