phil ringnalda

Could someone who actually understands Perl and Movable Type tell me if this makes sense? Back in the early days of Trackback crapflooding, when the flood was all supposedly coming from one source URL, I got to wondering what it would take to only accept one ping from one URL to one Trackback URL. It’s no longer any real use for that, but it’s still nice not to get multiple pings from everyone who has their PingTimeout set so low that they get tired of waiting for an answer long before you can tell them you got their ping.

Bunged into whatever file handles your pings ({MTdir}/extlib/jayallen/MTBlPing.pm or {MTdir}/lib/MT/App/Trackback.pm) far enough into the ping subroutine that things are defined already (I favor putting it right above the commented out ## Check if user has pinged recently bit):

    ## already pinged?
    if ( MT::TBPing->count({ source_url => $url, tb_id => $tb_id }) ){
        $app->log("Double ping from $url to $tb_id");
        return $app->_response(Error =>
            $app->translate("Looks like you already pinged that. Thanks anyway."));		
    }

Seems to me to work just fine to eliminate double pings. Can anyone see why it wouldn’t work, or some bad thing it would do that would explain why it isn’t already there? It will slow down the process of accepting a ping a tiny bit, of course, but that’s easily fixed by just increasing your PingTimeout setting in mt.cfg.

And speaking of PingTimeout, if you’re going to ping me, a nice long one would be a good idea. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to only accept pings from URLs that accept pings in return, but I am doing

    ## Plays well with others?
    use MT::Util qw( discover_tb );
    if ( discover_tb($url) ){
        $app->log("Found Tb data in $url");
    }

after I get done making sure I haven’t already been pinged by that URL, so I need you to give me enough time to get your page, and look for your Trackback RDF, before I can tell you I’ve accepted the ping. So far (I’ve been doing it for a couple of weeks now), I’ve only had one ping that I know of that timed out waiting, and tried to ping again later (which was then caught by the “one ping’s enough, Jack, better not make it three” section, so it worked fine for me).