Get banned by PPS

Just noticed that when liewcf make a comment on my post:

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1

I was banned without given a notice or warning. I know this is my fault to make so many pings in the short period and I don’t blame any one, this is their policy.

http://www.petalingstreet.org/archives/2006/02/ping_abuse.html

But this was done accidentally by upgrading wordpress from 2.0 to 2.0.1. Nobody can expect that!

But there is something that I really dislike, they listed out sites that have been banned. Other people might think these sites are spammer and don’t visit them. I think some of them aren’t, they done it accidentally and they are not spammers. PPS admin can study from the timestamp and content, you can know which posts are “spammed” purposely and which aren’t.

There is another person who has been banned like me:

“You are responsible for your blog and what it does on a public place like PPS.”

So the moral of the story is: Don’t do any upgrade on your blog system?

Here is his post about the case: I am not abusing PPS Ping!

Well… not everyone out there is a tech person, they (even your are a tech person) won’t know what will happen when they upgrade their wordpress. They aren’t going analyze the codes and database to see if there are pending trackbacks.

(So wordpress 2.0 users, please take note. If you have trackback problem previously in version 2.0, do not upgrade to 2.0.1 first, ask techie people to help you to make sure the previous trackbacks are not sent out at once)

There is another person who send pings with same title, same url and same timestamp. He is banned also without notice. Pitty him.

Duplicate pings can happen anytime especially on internet and web enviroment. Connection between browser and http server blog server and blog portal can get disconnected easily especially either one of them hosted on a high traffic (super busy) shared hosting. When this happens (or other problems like server busy or network congestion), the blog systems (any of them) while pinging a site might retry to send the ping again when connection is available again. They should know about these and prevent it!

So the moral of the story is: Make sure the connection is really good (between your server and PPS) before you want to ping to PPS?

PPS is a good site but they should have done better. They should have some kind of minimal spam filter on their trackback system. From what I know, ther are using sixapart standalone’s implementation of trackback engine. The script do nothing, it only receives pings and save it into file system.

I have stop pinging PPS but I would like to have some suggestions to PPS to make their system better… and all of these have been implemented in blogtal.com long time ago:

• Filter duplicate pings – Each ping has a unique url, keep it for days in database. Whenever people send a ping, check it with database.
• Filter multiple pings within some interval – User (in PPS case, identify by IP or whatever you can think) can only send the second ping after x minutes of the first ping. And up to certain warning level (too many attemps within the x minutes), send an email to admin saying these is a possible spam site and admin can do whatever he wants to do.
• Maximum ping per day from user – If the ping counter exceed the maximum level, send an email to admin saying these is a possible spam site and admin can do whatever he wants to do.
• If any incoming pings that violate the above rules, just drop it automatically.

I think this is the minimal requirement of a blog portal MUST implement… if something can be avoided, please avoid it… else many people will get banned easily. Once the site said “has been banned”, I think the owner won’t have “heart” anymore to come back.