Removal of Ping-o-Matic?

General Discussion
1

Hi All,

In the spirit of removing “old”, “stale” features, I was navigating through a test CP installation I setup recently and under:

Settings > Writing

I noticed a section Update Services

Presently in the box is “rpc.pingomatic.com” which reference’s Automattic owned ping service.

Per my research into the service, aside from a “privacy” concern whereby anything passed through that service likely ends up getting transmitted indirectly to Automattic…

The bigger thought regarding this service is that it is now “for the most part”, STALE… Why?

Well pinging services as I understand used to be a popular way (perhaps in some cases still is – hence the discussion) of telling a search engine about updates to a website, for instance when a new blog post has been published… However…

As my research discovered, such services by popular search engines (ex. Google and Bing) no longer exist, as they’ve been replaced by services like “Search Console”. These services require registration, submission from within, and validation, while their public “ping” services have been discontinued in favor of the newer service model.

Further, ping services were as explained by at least Google a source of “spamming” the search engine, hence why their newer “sitemaps” protocol is what they use.

So the big question…

“Do We Need the Update Services” feature at all?

Perhaps it’s time to remove this functionality from the codebase, and further clean up, speed up, and prioritize things that still matter.

Cheers!

2

I agree. I used to use it a lot, and some of my older websites are still using it.

I wrote about the services I am currently using here — WordPress Update Services: WordPress Ping List & Tutorial - getButterfly

But the main problem is that these pinging services are either dead, dying, or not maintained at all. I don’t see any SEO gain from them.

Even turning it into a core plugin is a bad idea, as the plugin will surely die a slow death. So I would definitely remove this functionality.

1 Like
3

@Ciprian,

From what I’ve read, search engines like Google and Bing prefer you register with them, and then they’ll send their bot to your site periodically and check for updates rather then have you tell them.

If they notice your content doesn’t update often, they’ll reduce the frequency automatically.

Also they have options within their panels to “request” that your site get a fresh visit by their bot, but as Google mentions, if you tell them to update too often, but nothing has changed eventually they’ll start ignoring your requests and follow a frequency of their choice.

So, yeah, most of these “ping” services are dead, not maintained, so why bother wasting bandwidth and resources sending to them, when it’s an “old” way of doing things that isn’t even supported by many sites anymore.

We need to evolve :slight_smile:

4

@MattyRob @Simone Would this be a breaking change for semver purposes?

1 Like
5

Yes, removing the code needs a deprecation in 2.x and wait for 3 to remove. Don’t know if just having a switch to turn off the feature can give benefits, as this feature is not used if not enabled in settings. But correct me if I’m wrong.

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6

@Simone,

Perhaps as a short-term workaround, simply “unpopulating” the form field in an update might be enough.

*** also if the functionality would break the current version by removing, could simply “hide” the feature on the page and flag for future removal ***

7

Removing the feature is a breaking change, as an interim we can ensure that default configuration is empty.

4 Likes
8

Simone has now created a PR at Empty "Update Services" list in writing options for new installations by xxsimoxx · Pull Request #1644 · ClassicPress/ClassicPress · GitHub that will ensure that no pings are sent from new sites by default.

4 Likes