Maybe we are all confused as to what a trackback vs a pingback is … because we read the documentation 🙂
http://wordpress.org/docs/reference/post/#trackback
Says: For more information about Trackbacks see Trackback explained. (Which doesn’t exist yet.)
Compare that to: http://wordpress.org/docs/reference/post/#pingback
That tells you what the thing does, but not to what effect. Perhaps it is time to further develop those areas a bit, especially for people just getting into it.
I have not fiddled with trackbacks much, but I am trying figure out the real value of using them. Obviously you may discover some common discussion. I understand it may help in search optimization. But what I don’t get is why I am getting slammed with trackbacks when I don’t show them on my site. I presume it must be an automated process to submit them because they would otherwise realize it is doing them no good. They don’t have a link to my blog on their site and I don’t have one to them. I do get their emails … is that the point? I am deciding now whether to upgrade to 1.5 or give it a week or two more for the shakeout. I am still running 1.2.2 on most of my sites.
A clarification for people who are as confused as I’ve been, if I’ve got this right:
TrackBack doesn’t have to be manual. It has a well-defined method for auto-discovery of TrackBack URLs. However, at this time WordPress doesn’t implement TrackBack’s auto-discovery protocol.
That has led to lots of misleading statements like “PingBack is automatic while TrackBack is manual”: that’s true in a WordPress context but not in general.
At least I think that’s the case. Please correct me if I’m wrong!
