LJ FAIL - Pingback b0rkery.
Also, I have opened a support request about pingbacks, because as I discovered yesterday thanks to cleolinda commenting on my journal, there seem to be pingbacks being sent out from my journal entries, even though I've disabled pingbacks myself.
The pingbacks FAQ says:
The pingback system is mutual; when you choose to receive pingbacks, you are also choosing to send pingbacks to others when you link to their content.
But I have pingbacks disabled. So WTF is happening there, eh?!
Also, as you can see from the chunk of the original journal entry which cleolinda received in her pingback, that is not a "brief quote" of text, as the pingbacks FAQ suggests it would be:
Pingback notifications include the name and URL of the page that is linking to your entry as well as a brief quote from the text where your entry is linked. [Emphasis mine.] Pingback comments to your journal will be left as screened comments. Please note that pingbacks only work for public entries. Friends-Only or Private entries cannot receive pingbacks.
It's a whopping huge quote, and the section where I linked to cleolinda's journal entry only comes at the end of it. I agree with what cleolinda says about that, especially about how this adds to the privacy invasion problem when some people are getting pingbacks from other people's F-locked journal entries.
So there's clearly problems with how pingbacks have been implemented and are working (or NOT working as they're supposed to!) There's a very thorough description of one person's attempt to test pingbacks here.
As you can see from the comments to this entry, in both cases, the pingback went through, even though those accounts are supposedly set NOT TO EVEN SEND PINGBACKS.
And as you can see from the comments to this entry, in both cases, the pingback went through AGAIN. (Trust me, I double-checked to be sure that both accounts were set with pingbacks DISABLED. They were.)
So it looks like I'm not the only one who has experienced this bug.
Man, it's bad enough LJ push through measures which they haven't properly beta tested, or run past their own account holders in advance. And then that is a bad surprise which pissess off thousands of people. Worse still though, they push through buggy measures which aren't working as advertised. It's a really lousy implementation, and I think they should just totally reverse the changes for now, until they can figure out the next step properly. Leaving all this crap in place is just going to make more users annoyed and alarmed - especially if the new "features" are buggy and unreliable, and we can't even trust LJ's own FAQs to properly describe how they are actually working.
The pingbacks FAQ says:
The pingback system is mutual; when you choose to receive pingbacks, you are also choosing to send pingbacks to others when you link to their content.
But I have pingbacks disabled. So WTF is happening there, eh?!
Also, as you can see from the chunk of the original journal entry which cleolinda received in her pingback, that is not a "brief quote" of text, as the pingbacks FAQ suggests it would be:
Pingback notifications include the name and URL of the page that is linking to your entry as well as a brief quote from the text where your entry is linked. [Emphasis mine.] Pingback comments to your journal will be left as screened comments. Please note that pingbacks only work for public entries. Friends-Only or Private entries cannot receive pingbacks.
It's a whopping huge quote, and the section where I linked to cleolinda's journal entry only comes at the end of it. I agree with what cleolinda says about that, especially about how this adds to the privacy invasion problem when some people are getting pingbacks from other people's F-locked journal entries.
So there's clearly problems with how pingbacks have been implemented and are working (or NOT working as they're supposed to!) There's a very thorough description of one person's attempt to test pingbacks here.
As you can see from the comments to this entry, in both cases, the pingback went through, even though those accounts are supposedly set NOT TO EVEN SEND PINGBACKS.
And as you can see from the comments to this entry, in both cases, the pingback went through AGAIN. (Trust me, I double-checked to be sure that both accounts were set with pingbacks DISABLED. They were.)
So it looks like I'm not the only one who has experienced this bug.
Man, it's bad enough LJ push through measures which they haven't properly beta tested, or run past their own account holders in advance. And then that is a bad surprise which pissess off thousands of people. Worse still though, they push through buggy measures which aren't working as advertised. It's a really lousy implementation, and I think they should just totally reverse the changes for now, until they can figure out the next step properly. Leaving all this crap in place is just going to make more users annoyed and alarmed - especially if the new "features" are buggy and unreliable, and we can't even trust LJ's own FAQs to properly describe how they are actually working.