I recently noticed that my blog was no longer registering pingbacks (the automatic in-comment notification that occurs when somebody else blogs about your post). I like these because they help me understand which of my articles are gaining traction.
My symptoms
- My other blogs hosted on the same server seem to be pinging fine; however, those have far less posts and plugins
- I am able to send pingbacks, apparently
- But ping backs TO my content were dropped (even when I am self-pinging)
The fix
I figured the issue was somehow related to my recent upgrades of WordPress. After scouring the web, I found that the issue was due to a poorly designed timeout setting in WordPress.
- Open wp-includes/cron.php in your blog folder
- Go to the line that starts with: wp_remote_post( in the spawn_cron function
- Change ‘timeout’ => 0.01 to ‘timeout’ => 1 (or any other far more reasonable value)
This will fix blogs that are plagued by this bug.