I had, in my flurry of modifications when moving from WordPress to Wordform, left out a modification to the code that enabled pings to work, and as a consequence, had not been pinging Pingomatic the last few months. Realizing this, I fixed the problem and started pinging this week.
Unfortunately, the relative quiet I’ve had for the last few months and being almost virtually free of unwanted entries in my comments was shattered less than 24 hours later, and I now have to consider using whitelisting in addition to closing comments over ten days old. Whitelisting means that the only comments that post immediately are those from people who have commented previously; others are held in moderation.
I’ve also removed the ping to Pingomatic, and am looking at pinging individual services, but NOT weblogs.com or blo.gs or any other service that provides a nice, tasty list of fresh meat. These services seem to me to be more dinner calls to the unwanted then ‘ways’ of discovering new weblogs. But since I made the mistake of saying the same thing about blogrolls, I’ll qualify this statement by saying that in my personal opinion these seem to be more dinner calls to the unwanted then vehicles of discovery.
If you’ve not left an email address in the past, you’ll have to now. You don’t have to leave a real email address but you have to put something in that looks real, and becomes your way of being identified in the system. The email address doesn’t publish, and I don’t particularly care about it (making an assumption that it’s most likely fake, anyway); but it’s required.
If you do end up momentarily moderated, at least you’ll be able to see how I provide feedback that your comment is currently being moderated. For every cloud burst there’s fresh mold to feed the tiny ants. Or something.
As for Pingomatic, there is an API associated with this service, though I can’t seem to find it. I’m hoping there’s a way to configure the ping request to only ping certain services, so that I don’t have to send a bunch of ping requests out, individually.