Title: Trackback hell
Last modified: August 18, 2016

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# Trackback hell

 *  [dahowlett](https://wordpress.org/support/users/dahowlett/)
 * (@dahowlett)
 * [20 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/trackback-hell/)
 * I made a post on my site where I linked ot another site. At the other site I 
   made a comment on the post in question. Later, when I returned to the site on
   which I had commented, I found a comment entry that was a good chunk of my post–
   like a trackback – except I DIDN’T trackback to the site. This is really weird.
   The other person’s site operates on WordPress.com – is there something I’m missing
   here? I can see the site has been pinged but I didn’t expect to see a wadge of
   my post elsewhere – is there any way of retricting this? It’s very bad news. 
   I have to confess I’m failry new on this platform so is it something I need to
   deal with in the ping settings?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

 *  Moderator [James Huff](https://wordpress.org/support/users/macmanx/)
 * (@macmanx)
 * [20 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/trackback-hell/#post-299788)
 * By linking to the other blog post in your post, you sent a [pingback](http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#Pingbacks)
   to it. You can disable this feature by deselecting “Attempt to notify any Weblogs
   linked to from the article” in Options/Discussion.
 *  Thread Starter [dahowlett](https://wordpress.org/support/users/dahowlett/)
 * (@dahowlett)
 * [20 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/trackback-hell/#post-299975)
 * According to the blurb, pingbacks should not send content but that’s what happened.
 *  Moderator [James Huff](https://wordpress.org/support/users/macmanx/)
 * (@macmanx)
 * [20 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/trackback-hell/#post-300026)
 * The actual ping does not send content, but as it is a form of comment (think 
   of it as an easy trackback), the pinged blog scans the pinging entry to collect
   some content for a suitable comment. Again, think of it as an easy trackback.
   What you are seeing is normal behavior. You can disable this feature by deselecting“
   Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article” in Options/Discussion.
 *  Thread Starter [dahowlett](https://wordpress.org/support/users/dahowlett/)
 * (@dahowlett)
 * [20 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/trackback-hell/#post-300034)
 * Ok – having read through the documentation and your comments, it might be useful
   to note that the explaantion of this functionality is misleading because in this
   particular case, WP sent over much more text than I would have expected. In the
   alternative, are there settings in the php that can restrict the amount of text–
   like a trackback – which is sent yet retain the benefitsthat pingback provides?
 *  Moderator [James Huff](https://wordpress.org/support/users/macmanx/)
 * (@macmanx)
 * [20 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/trackback-hell/#post-300038)
 * WordPress collects the entire paragraph that the link belongs to (everything 
   withing the `<p>` and `</p>` tags which surround the link). There are certain
   themes which truncate this information to only display the link word and a small
   amount of the words surrounding it, so that can be done on the receiver’s end,
   but I’m not sure of how to change the core functionality to effect how the content
   is sent/retreived on the sender’s end.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

The topic ‘Trackback hell’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [pings](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/pings/)
 * [trackback](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/trackback/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 5 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [James Huff](https://wordpress.org/support/users/macmanx/)
 * Last activity: [20 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/trackback-hell/#post-300038)
 * Status: not resolved

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