Disable External Pingacks on WordPress Posts and Only Allow ‘Self Pings’

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I use wordpress for my Social Media site. WordPress Pings allow other blog posts to appear in comments when they link to us.

I want to limit it to only blog posts created on my own site. Basically I only want SELF-PINGS/Trackbacks.

If Other site tries to send ping reject it then and their, but if my own site https://milyin.com’s post tries to send a ping readily accept it and show it in comment section.

I tried, wp-admin -> discussion -> (unselect) Allow links from other blog posts.

But that disables internal Pings too.
Secondly My authors are able to turn on/off the pingbacks for each post. So, many of the posts still recieve external pings.

Here’s a screenshot of the same: https://snipboard.io/8lVIrE.jpg

I tried to do some code.

I found a tutorial from How Disable Self Pingbacks in WordPress

And I tried to modify it to fit my needs

function SelfPing( &$links ) {
    $Home = get_option( 'home' );
    foreach ( $links as $l => $link ){
        if ( strpos( $link, $Home )  === false){
            unset($links[$l]);
        }
    }
}
add_action( 'pre_ping', 'SelfPing' );

However this didn’t solve the purpose.

I still recieve pings from all sorts of sites, on my posts, as majority of my authors manually turn on Pings.

So How can I have only self pings, and remove external pings, even when my authors manually turn on pings for all posts.

2 Answers
2

If you want to receive only linkbacks from your own WordPress site, then try both of these:

But if you want to allow all that were sent as trackbacks (where the comment type is trackback), then just ignore the second snippet below, which I added because in default/core themes like Twenty Twenty-One, both pingbacks and trackbacks would each appear as a “Pingback” in the post’s comments section.

  1. This uses the xmlrpc_call action to disable pingbacks sent via the XML-RPC method:

    add_action( 'xmlrpc_call', 'disallow_external_xmlrpc_pingback', 10, 3 );
function disallow_external_xmlrpc_pingback( $name, $args, $server ) {
    if ( 'pingback.ping' == $name && false === strpos( $args[0], home_url() ) ) {
        // Exit with a proper error.
        $server->error( new IXR_Error( 0, 'Sorry, trackbacks from remote sites are not allowed.' ) );
    }
}

  2. This uses the pre_trackback_post action to disable trackbacks sent via the standard HTTP POST method (i.e. not using XML-RPC):

    add_action( 'pre_trackback_post', 'disallow_external_POST_trackback', 10, 2 );
function disallow_external_POST_trackback( $tb_id, $tb_url ) {
    if ( false === strpos( $tb_url, home_url() ) ) {
        // Exit with a proper error.
        trackback_response( 1, 'Sorry, trackbacks from remote sites are not allowed.' );
    }
}

And BTW, in the code in the question, $home is undefined and it should be $Home ( note the uppercase “H” and see this which says, “variable name is case-sensitive” 🙂 ).

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