Dealing with duplicate pings

Weblogs often generate multiple trackback pings to the same entry. This is usually because a timeout in the initial ping caused the process to fail to acknowledge, so the sending weblog tries again next time the user updates the entry.
To avoid sending out duplicate pings, if you get an error after posting, go to the recipient blog and verify whether the ping made it or not. If it didn’t, try republishing the entry (MT will keep the ping URL handy until it knows it has worked). If it did, manually remove the ping URL from the box on the entry page in MT, so that it won’t be sent again if the entry is ever rebuilt.
As for incoming pings, that’s trickier. The main MT page lists the most recent 5 pings, but the items link out to the incoming post, so there’s no clue about which local entry was the recipient of the ping. For example, on the RFB main page right now, there are two incoming pings that are actually from RFB (filchy’s “Is linking like sex” entry). It was duplicated when he changes the capitalization of the entry and republished. It would have come through again, too, as the ping URL was still there in the box. (I removed it, but then later wished I had tracked it down.)
The thing is, I can’t tell which local entries those pings go to. Examining flichyboy’s posts, I can’t find any links to RFB entries, so it appears to be a manually added trackback. If I could find the recipient entry, I would manually delete the first ping and keep the second one (Which has the correct capitalization.)
By the way, sometimes you ping somebody and then notice a typo that is now memorialized on the pinged blog. In those cases, if it matters, I notify the person, fix the typo and reping them, and ask them to manually delete the incorrect one.


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