Hi all, Before I cut Roller 7 I'd like to retire one more obsolete feature: outbound weblog update pings: the weblogUpdates.ping XML-RPC calls Roller sends to ping servers when a post is published.
The case for dropping it: - It is a dead protocol. Google Blog Search, Technorati and FeedBurner Pingshot have all shut down, and Bing's sitemap ping now returns 410 Gone. Ping-O-Matic is about the only relay still answering, and what it relays to is mostly dead too. - No real value. Pinging no longer helps indexing or ranking; search engines discover new content through sitemaps (and IndexNow for Bing/Yandex), not pings. Even WordPress keeps pinging only as an inert legacy setting. - Less to carry. It is network-facing code and admin UI we no longer need to maintain. Scope: the ping-targets admin pages and per-weblog ping settings, the XML-RPC ping client and queue, and the related config keys and database tables. Anybody opposed to this? Thanks, Dave
