[Plugin: WP-SpamFree] Cannot send or recieve ping and trackback after upgrade to 1.9.6.6

It doesn’t stop working for everyone. Also, the error you’re talking about happens randomly even when no plugins are installed. There’s a glitch in WordPress.

No, WordPress has no known “glitches” along these lines. If you’re not receiving pingtracks or trackbacks, then something else is blocking them from reaching your site.

The WP-SpamFree plugin does have an option to block pings/tracks entirely, so you might check to see if that option is not turned on by mistake.

Alternatively, if you can’t get it to work, then you could try one of many other anti-spam plugins. Personally, I find that the combination of Cookies for Comments and Akismet are an almost 100% solution on all the blogs I administer. They are also both extremely well written code which run very fast and which have a very low overhead.

Otto42:

Just because it isn’t acknowledged doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I’ve seen the glitch quite a few times and I know many others who have as well.

People in this thread are talking about it blocking outgoing pings, and it has no code that would affect that. You are right, it’s good to check that the option to block incoming trackbacks and pingbacks isn’t checked, even though that’s addressing a different issue. It’s off by default though.

As always, thanks for your helpful input.

Just because it isn’t acknowledged doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I’ve seen the glitch quite a few times and I know many others who have as well.

That’s as may be, however you are speculating as to the cause of your problem without sufficient evidence. Nobody has ever pointed it out or reproduced this problem in any way that I am aware of. The code for pingback and trackback sending is very, very straightforward and easy to follow. If it was there, then it would be rather easy to track down and find.

So if there is some specific case or problem you can point out, then by all means do so. However until you feel like doing that, calling it a “glitch” is unfounded, because it’s not really an issue with WordPress until it has actually been shown to be an issue. Understand?

Placing blame on anything for problems, when you have no evidence to back up those claims, is unacceptable here. Unless you know specifically what the problem is, do not speculate on it. And yes, I will have something to say about it regardless of what particular piece of software you happen to be placing the blame on.

We do not traffic in the blame game in these forums, so do not let it happen again.

Edit: Note that I do agree that your plugin is probably not the cause. I just take exception to your calling something a “glitch” without pointing out what exactly the problem is. It’s rather bad form, IMO, and I don’t appreciate that sort of thing around here.

I just downloaded and took a look at the latest version of WP-SpamFree (I had not examined the code in a while) and the only thing I see that might possibly cause this sort of thing is that there is a rather large amount of code happening at the init action hook. There’s a lot of random key generation, loading, processing, etc.

It’s possible (although really unlikely) that this could delay the cron process enough to break the timing of pingback sending on slow or overloaded servers just enough to be a problem.

If this was happening, then one could prevent the problem by adding this line of code to the top of the plugin:
if (DOING_CRON) return;

That would make the entire plugin not load when the wp-cron process was running, which would eliminate it entirely from the possible list of things that could be interfering with the do_all_pings bits.

Hey Otto. Thanks for looking into that. I’ll take a look at your suggestions and see about integrating that.

Please don’t in take offense if speak of a potential glitch in WP – I’m not attempting to throw blame. I was just expressing thoughts, which I think we’re still free to do here. ?? For the record I think WordPress is the best blog platform out there, and one of my favorite pieces of software. Even the most sophisticated and developed software is bound to have minor glitches…that doesn’t stop it from being great. It’s just the life of programming.

With all due respect WebGeek, you seem very quick to place the blame elsewhere when something might be wrong with WP-Spamfree. People here have stated repeatedly that switching on WP-Spamfree blocks pingbacks, and switching it off allows them to work again. What if the latest version of the plug-in is inadvertantly switching on “block pingbacks” all the time, regardless of how the user sets it? This is an obvious possibility, but you haven’t even investigated it.

Also, I opened a thread three weeks ago – and sent you a support email as well – about WP-Spamfree blocking legitimate comments at the blog I run. I came up with a couple of feature requests that could possibly solve this problem, but you haven’t responded at all.

Anyway, I’ve made the switch to Cookies for Comments and WP Hashcash, which combines cookies and Javascript as your plug-in does, but with far greater compatibility and (unlike WP-Spamfree) no false positives. And also unlike Spamfree, you can set them to moderate, so even if there are false positives, you can catch them anyway. With WP-Spamfree, you can never know if it’s blocking legitimate comments unless your readers complain (as mine have) or you happen to catch it out (as I have a well).

WebGeek, I did not say it happens for everyone, I just said that it happens for me perfectly synchronized with the plugin activation/deactivation so that makes it unlikely to be a WP glitch.

Indeed I do not necessarily blame your plugin and it might very well be a combo with the way my host has setup his server. It might even be the cron delay that Otto42 mentioned (which I’m going to check later)

But the fact that this happens and is easy to replicate makes it worth investigating.

As before, this seems to affect only outgoing pingbacks for me, as I managed to receive one (although I won’t know if I missed any unless I see it through google blog search backlinks).

As said before this happens to a lot of people who probably don’t even know it. It is happening on everyone of my blogs that uses wp-spamfree. The ones that don’t use i.e. the ones on wordpress.com and a couple of other places it doesn’t happen. When I uninstall the plugin on Host Gator, Zyon, and Blue Host based blogs trackbacks and pings start going out again. This is happening not just on single installs but on Mu installs as well in version 2.5, 2.6.2, 2.6.3 and 2.6.5 and 2.6.3mu and 2.6.5mu Removing the plugin always fixes the problem. Take that for what it is worth.

I am currently removing wp-spamfree from 48 blogs I manage for this very reason all of which have this problem. The plugin works great and will be happy to return using it when this issue is resolved.

The other big problem with WP-Spamfree is that it occasionally blocks legitimate comments, and unfortunately the author seems unwilling to recognise the problem, let alone do anything about it. I would like the option of switching off the algorithmic layer, as I believe this is what causes the problems – I really think that moderation is the only way to deal with human spam without false positives, and the JavaScript/Cookie layers already completely block bots.

Anyway, I started another thread on this issue, which has lots of good discussion about the pros and cons of the various alternatives to WP-Spamfree – you should be able to find an anti-spam solution that works well for you by going through the comments there:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/214198

I’ve continued to look into this. What we’ve found is that we cannot recreate the error. Many many, blogs still have no problem with sending and receiving pingbacks. If you are still having problems, I suggest you upgrade your blog to the latest version of WordPress. (From what we’ve seen, WP 2.7+ does not seem to have any problems with this, and we’ve tested this on a LOT of blogs, and many different servers.)

If that does not take care of the issue for you, please contact me directly through the WP-SpamFree Support page, and I’ll look into each case individually.