Hi Karen,

In simple terms, they are there to try and give some validity to where the comments on blogs are orginating from.

Do they work? Discuss lol

So, are they a good thing and do I 'approve' them or not?:confused:

And what's the difference between a 'pingback' and a 'trackback'

Thanks

Karen

Pingbacks and trackbacks are basically the same thing...

It's an automatic notification sent to a website that the originating page is somehow relevant so that the notified page can include a link back.

The difference between the two is that pingbacks tend to validate that a link exists from the originating page so that it will be a little less susceptible to spam tactics, whereas a trackback just assumes that the originating page is relevant.

In practical use, the two terms are interchangeable.

For my websites, I require a user's first comment to be manually approved before they can post indiscriminately on my website, and since each individual page comes through as their own user it means I need to approve each one.

This means that if it gets past my spam queue, then I'll just check out the link and if it's relevant I'll approve it to appear on my site, and if it's not relevant or is obviously a spam blog then I'll either delete or mark the trackback/pingback as spam as appropriate.

Most blogging software (such as Wordpress) will manage sending and receiving both pingbacks and trackbacks automatically using XML-RPC (basically a behind the scenes way of notifying one another without requiring the full HTML headers being sent back and forth.) Some themes will display received pingbacks/trackbacks as comments, others will display them in their own section of the comments or the sidebar, and others won't display them at all, so it is pretty customizable.

Thank you both - the mud begins to clear!

Karen