Somebody translated one of my tutorials here (with my permission).
All fine but I got comments that seem unintended on two of my tutorials that the translation links to.
Now the weird thing is that they don’t have an comment_author_email
! I tried to post a comment on one of my tutorials (browser logged out) without specifying an email address and I couldn’t (that’s how it should be).
I am using the Anti-spam plugin which -so far- did an outstanding job for me.
Does anybody understand what’s going on? Should I worry about my site being/getting hacked? What should I do?
Thanks in advance!
1 Answer
Pingbacks/Trackbacks:
This is most likely a harmless case of link notifications to your blog (A) from the other blog (B), where:
- the
comment_author_email
field is usually empty, - the
comment_type
field is either pingback or trackback, -
the
comment_author
field has the form:The title of the post that contains a link to a post of blog A | The site name of blog B
It looks like the blog B has this activated:
Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article
and blog A has this activated:
Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)
in the Discussion settings.
Screenshot:
Here’s a description of trackbacks/pingbacks from the Codex.
From the WordPress admin:
Trackbacks are a way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked
to them. If you link other WordPress sites they’ll be notified
automatically using pingbacks, no other action necessary.
The automatic pingbacks use the XML-RPC protocol to communicate, you can see it for example in the comment_agent
field:
The Incutio XML-RPC PHP Library — WordPress/3.9.1