mlanger

It shouldn’t be related to a plugin at all. It should just work — as long as you have options configured properly. (I know I do.)

I’m trying hard to find similarities among the people with this problem, but am getting nowhere. It’s very frustrating.

Looks like the the Clean Archives plugin went bad. It was so bad, it didn’t even appear in my plugins page listing. I deleted it off the server and voila! My site is back to normal!

Thanks so much for the help. I was so busy troubleshooting the gibberish problem that I didn’t think to find the solution in the error message.

Will check this now. Thanks.

Okay, here’s another question for the experts: what version of PHP is REQUIRED for trackbacks/pingbacks? Perhaps I’m not up-to-date enough.

Keep in mind that this is the only feature I seem to be having problems with.

You said: “but that doesn’t make any entry in my site.”

You mean that it doesn’t make an entry in the site you’re tracking back to, don’t you?

When you do a trackback, the trackback should appear as a comment on the site you’re tracking back to. The entry the trackback is attached to is the only thing that should appear on your site.

Or are you having trouble RECEIVING trackbacks from other sites?

Just trying to figure out if we’re troubleshooting the same issue.

A follow-up on the above.

I flushed out the to_ping field for the MySQL database for my blog. (There were only five entries and they were all for my recent tests.) I then tried again to send a pingback and a trackback to the test site. No luck.

I then followed Avery Parker’s suggestion and upped my PHP memory allocation to 32 MB (I tried 16MB first) in the php.ini file. This didn’t resolve the problem, either.

I removed all update services from the Writing Options administration panel except https://rpc.pingomatic.com/. No luck.

I’m now officially out of options. Got any more suggestions?

Again, I can RECEIVE trackbacks and pingbacks without any problems.

And one more fact that might be a symptom: if I go back to “edit” a post with a trackback, the URL is still in the trackback box. There’s no indication that it has been sent. On a wordpress.com blog (I have one of those for testing purposes), after sending a trackback, the edit box is cleared and the URL appears in a list of pings beneath the trackback area.

Podz, a bunch of us are having this problem. We can receive trackbacks and pingbacks from the TestTrack site, but we can’t send them there.

Can you help us isolate what the problem might be, perhaps by suggesting possible “fixes” until one works?

I’m about to try the “fix” that requires me to clear the ping field in my MySQL database. (Need to track down the support article with instructions.) If that doesn’t work, I’ll try the fix for the PHP memory increase (https://www.averyjparker.com/2006/04/08/wordpress-trackback-problem-finally-solved/).

I think what I’d like to see is a solution to the problem. If we find one, I’ll write an entry for the Codex with the symptoms and solution so people who have this problem in the future can look there.

What’s frustrating about this is that because only SOME people are having the problem, there isn’t a concentrated support and troubleshooting effort. And to make matters worse, people who have the problem keep starting new support threads rather than just jumping on an existing thread to add their info. That makes gathering information about the systems having the problem extremely difficult.

Let’s get it fixed!

Okay, I thought so. I have two WordPress installs on my computer, so I’m going to attempt to modify the php.ini file first. (Now that I’m in the office, I have full access to the server.) If that doesn’t work, I’ll create and modify the .htaccess files in each WordPress folder.

Thanks for your help.

I also wish an expert would join in. The problem HAS been around for a while, but since not everyone is having the problem, it appears that the experts don’t want to spend time working the problem out with the people who are having it. I can understand that, especially if there are other problems that are more universally felt.

It is very frustrating to me, but I’ll continue to work on it Hopefully, someone with some good information will speak up here and I can work with him/her to find the solution once and for all.

I do appreciate your help so far. It’s good to know that mod_rewrite is probably NOT the problem.

Here’s another dumb question. Is mod_rewrite REQUIRED for sending trackbacks and pingbacks?

I am unable to get pretty permalinks to work right but am satisfied with the default URL format. I suspect my permalink problem is due to the weird install of mod_rewrite for the Apache software built into Mac OS X 10.4 server (which I run). I’ve seen articles around the Web about this, but never bothered to fix it since I don’t care too much about what the URLs look like. But if it’s causing my trackback/pingback problem, I’d revisit. I frequently link to blogs in my posts and would like the pingbacks to be sent and received.

What do you think? Any ideas?

Glad I wasn’t imagining things! It looked good to me.

Don’t forget to mark this “resolved.”

They look the same to me. Both include the same login info and links in the Identification area. Have you resolved this problem already?

You just want a post’s category to appear above the title, right? You should be able to do that pretty easily by modifying the contents of The Loop for your theme so the_category tag appears on the line before the_title.

For more information, read Stepping Into Template Tags and The Loop. That should be enough to get you started.

The appearance of the category name (or any other content, for that matter) depends on styles applied to it, so you’d have to be pretty handy with CSS to get it to look like what you see on thinkprogress.org, if that’s what you’re after.

Good luck!

And PHP should be installed as an Apache module, right? Not in CGI mode? Please clarify for my dense little head so I can check it out.

And thanks for the tip.

When you say you should “never hit blanks” inside WP, what do you mean? After creating a post in post.php and clicking Publish, what should happen? On my WordPress setups, a new post.php window, ready for a new post appears. Is that not right?

I have used TestTrack several times. I can RECEIVE both trackbacks and pingbacks. I cannot SEND trackbacks or pingbacks.

When you say “the host,” what about the host could be the problem? I’m running my own server and have a great deal of control over it. What should I be looking to fix?

Keep in mind that everything else seems to work just fine. You don’t think it’s a memory issue because of the size of my databases? Or the number of plugins? Or the fact that my little server is hosting 2 large and 1 small WordPress blogs?

Where do you think I should look?

I am not the only person having this problem…I’ve been reading posts on a number of threads here. It seems that only some of us have the problem. What do we have in common? I wish we could get together on one thread and talk it out.

I’d really like to get it working right, so I’d appreciate any suggestions you have to offer. Thanks!