Reader Poll: The Future of Pingbacks

With the WordPress site format (now just over a year old) it’s easy and common for other sites to automatically link within the WordPress network. These result in the “pingbacks” you see, which are basically comments pointing to sites that point back to us. The authors have been discussing them for a while, and we’d like reader input: should the pingbacks stay or go?

16 replies on “Reader Poll: The Future of Pingbacks”

  1. Does that include all the automatic tweet things? Because those are annoying. Makes it look like there are a lots of comments but there are actually none.

    I’d also love email notifications when someone replies to a comment I made. No idea if WP can do that though.

  2. I hate them, but I understand they may be bringing a lot of traffic to the site. Either keep them separated and out of the way as mentioned above, or a per-user setting to hide them completely.

    BUT please do stop them going towards the response count. That’s very misleading.

  3. I think I’m pretty much in agreement with everyone else so far. Dump ’em or at least see if there’s a way to push them into some other non-comment area.

    • I find them really annoying mixed in with the comments, but if they generate traffic or revenue that help keep the site alive, then I’d be OK with them staying if the alternative were to maybe lose the site alogether. In that case, I’d much prefer it if they were put into their own section at the foot of the real comments and ideally formatted differently as well. Black text on a black background would be ideal. :)

      Needless to say, if they don’t help support the site, then my vote would be to please get rid of them!

  4. Not a fan, They are hard to read. The group them somewhere away from comments seems fine to me though.

  5. Add me to the group them separately from the comments crowd. Having to search through them to find the actual discussion is really annoying.

  6. Pingbacks are just visual clutter. They’re not actual comments so they get in the way of the REAL comments. I’ve never understood why websites allow those things to be in the public area since they seem to be an internal kind of thing, allowing a site admin to know who’s linking to them. Why would the readers care? It’s visual garbage and gets in the way of content. Please please please lose it immediately so we can get back to insightful comments.

  7. How do you get people to comment at Bureau42?

    Ask’em about pingbacks!

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by PuppetSocko PuppetSocko said: New: Reader Poll: The Future of Pingbacks

  8. I say dump ’em, unless they can be moved to the sidebar and not considered actual comments.

  9. IMO, they should go. I had to disable them on my personal blog because they were being used to post spam links.

    Also, while they’re a feel-good type of thing, I don’t think they really serve much of a purpose for the Bureau42 user base. Certainly they clutter up the RSS feed.

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