removing pingback

I’ve not the slightest idea what “drop my meta pingback” is supposed to mean. But if you want to stop pingbacks, then yes, the checkboxes under settings-discussion is where you do it. Your site can both send and receive pingbacks. The unchecking the first checkbox – “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article” stops pingbacks from being sent. Unchecking the second checkbox – “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” stops your site from receiving pingbacks.

IMO these two should either be enabled together or disabled together. Enabling only one or the other seems odd to me.

Thank you very much for your message bcworkz, I already disabled the pingbacks, but as far as I know it will only disable on feature posts.

I guess I am supposed to get rid off the old ones as well. I do not understend this, but I was doing some research and they also talk about disabling some xmlrpc.php file or I should use some SQl and run this query:

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ AND post_type = ‘post’;
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ AND post_type = ‘page’;

Apparently the firs one will disable the exiting and the second lkine will stop the future? But this is all like chinese for me:-(

Sort of, not exactly. The lines are executed in phpMyAdmin under the “SQL” tab. The ‘wp_posts’ is correct provided you have not specified a different prefix in your wp-config.php file. If you have, use the proper prefix.

What these do is disable all pingback comments for all existing posts and pages in the database. The checkbox settings prevent future pingbacks.

The xmlrpc.php file is only peripherally related. This file allows you to interact remotely with your site using a suitable web client and/or your favorite scripting language instead of logging in directly to your server via the WP backend. One of the many things you can do is add, read, and edit comments. To do this or anything by RPC, proper login credentials must be provided just as if one were logging into the WP backend. No one can add, edit or even read comments without the proper credentials via RPC.

Some people consider RPC capabilities as a security risk and recommend disabling the capability if it is not being used. You may do so if you like by simply renaming the file. Be aware that any WP update may restore the file. I’ve personally never seen an RPC attack on my site. All attempts were either via wp-login.php or a plugin with known vulnerabilities (which I don’t have). YMMV ??

Thank you so much bcworkz for helping me! I realy spent now days learning and trying to understand this:-( I still did not figure out how to remove the old pingback and trackback and how to get rid of it complete:-( Is there some guide for dummies how to do it step by step?

Best regards
July

I’m sorry this is so time consuming for you. Fortunately, learning something is never a complete waste ??

Am I correct in assuming your site now does not allow any new ping and trackbacks at all, and now you wish to remove all old ones as well?

All you need is another mySQL query to run in phpMyAdmin to delete all comments where the type is either trackback or pingback. I’m not very good at SQL, so do not use this example until it’s been safely tested and verified to work properly:
DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_type LIKE '%back' LIMIT 1;

I added a limit clause to limit potential damage in case it does the wrong thing. If you’re sure it’s working right, remove the LIMIT 1 to turn it loose on the entire database. Also, once again, confirm the table prefix is correct. The wrong unlimited query can completely destroy a database, so make a complete backup before doing anything even remotely risky.

A much safer, though more time consuming approach is to search for the track and pingbacks in phpMyAdmin and delete the search results once you’ve confirmed only records intended to be deleted are in the results. Normally you can only delete one page at a time, but there is a “show all” option. Showing all could choke your browser if there are several hundreds of these. It may be better to set the maximum rows to display value to a couple hundred in the main browse settings and resign yourself to deleting page by page.