A "pingback" is a system whereby URLs you might reference in a blog post are
contacted by the blog publishing software at publishing time (i.e., once) so
that they might update a list of "pingbacks" to the URL. The originating
URL's blog software might then display a list of pingbacks, or an excerpt of
the text from your blog, perhaps interleaved with comments, etc.

At a technical level, external URLs are extracted from your blog post by the
blogging software, fetched, inspected for information to determine whether the
remote server is configured to support pingbacks (look for link tags, or HTTP
headers) and the relevant pingback URL sent an XML-RPC packet.

There are other technologies to achieve the same thing: trackbacks predate
pingbacks but are more vulnerable to spam due to design problems.

The spec for pingbacks is at <http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback>.

I would like to somehow use pingbacks in conjunction with ikiwiki. I suppose
this could be achieved using a commit hook and some external software in which
case I will consider this done with an entry in [[tips]]; otherwise a
[[plugins|plugin]] to implement pingbacks would be great.

-- [[Jon]] (Wed Jan 14 13:48:47 GMT 2009)

> I think it's now possible to implement trackback and pingback receiving
> support in ikiwiki. One easy way to do it would be to hook it into the
> existing [[plugins/comments]] plugin -- each pingback/trackback that
> ikiwiki recieves would result in the creation if a new comment, which
> would be subject to the usual comment filtering (ie, blogspam) and
> moderation and would then show up amoung the other, regular comments on
> the page.
>
> (One wrinkle: would need to guard against duplicate pings. Maybe by
> checking existing comments for any that have the same url?)
> 
> As for sending trackbacks and pingbacks, this could fairly easily be
> implemented using a `editcontent` hook. Since this hook is called
> whenever a page is posted or edited, and gets the changed content, it can
> simply scan it for urls (may have to htmlize first?), and send pings to
> all urls found. --[[Joey]] 

>> Is there any update on this? This would be highly useful and is the main reason why I am not using my blog more regularly, yet. (And yes, now that git-annex is doing everything I need and more, I thought I should revisit this one, as well). -- RichiH

----

Happy 9th anniversary, bug!

For whatever reason I was compelled to look at this situation afresh. I've
added some instrumentation to my own site to see whether there's any external
attempts to issue pingbacks to my own site, to gauge whether it's worthwhile
spending any more time on this. But it looks like pingback in the wider world
might be dead or dying.

[I started a conversation on Twitter with the inventor of Pingback to see what
he thought](https://twitter.com/jmtd/status/1042730998839107585). He suggested
taking a look at "webmentions". here's some preliminary reading on those:

 * <https://indieweb.org/Webmention>
 * <https://kryogenix.org/days/2014/11/29/enabling-webmentions/>
 * <https://www.kryogenix.org/days/2014/11/30/vouching-for-webmentions-hashing-for-vouches/>

At this point I don't know if webmentions actually has more traction than pingback,
but the key issue I guess is whether it's growing. I'm going to (but am yet to) add
corresponding instrumentation to my site to try and track that, too.
-- [[Jon]] (2018-09-24)
