My hair is falling out. I've looked at this off and on for weeks and tonight for five hours and I cannot work out what is going on and what is supposed to be going on. I've followed the instructions and assistance from the support thread "Help me to help myself" from a while back and still have problems.

If I make a blog post referring to someone else's blog elsewhere they seem to get a ping okay and my post gets listed under teh one it refers to one their site. But at my end, if someone posts linking to me I see nothing. I get thousands of spam trackbacks, so something is working, but I don't seem to get "real" ones.

From another Drupal based site (with Trackback enabled as well) I have I posted an entry with a link to a post (that's the friendly URL link not the permalink) on my main blog (http://www.jockcoats.org.uk). Oh - I use ecto for blogging - but since other people's sites automatically get my trackbacks I don't think the problem is with ecto. Having read the Trackback Specification I thought that if I click on the link to my main blog from my other site, my main blog will "discover" where that click has come from and recognize that it's linking to me and create a trackback. Or, is it that the Trackback module on my other site parses my post and does the pinging of my main site? That seems to be what the help text in the Trackback module settings page is saying - but is that right?

Now, if I go to some of the trackback testing sites mentioned in that earlier support discussion and I enter the Trackback URL/permalink URL I see a trackback appear in my logs. But people shouldn't have to look for my permalink should they? It appears that auto-discovery should tell them what the Trackback URL is at some point - when they post? when someone clicks through the link on their site?

I just don't understand the process enough, despite reading what looks like the simplest tech spec in internet history! And it's really bugging me because I can't work out whether I'm doing something wrong or what.

Any ideas?

Looking forward to it,

Jock Coats

Comments

jockox3@drupal.org’s picture

jockox3@drupal.org commented
Version: 5.x-1.2 » 5.x-1.x-dev

It would really help me to have some assistance with this to know if it's something I'm doing wrong. I am still not getting ANY trackbacks apart from spam ones. I recently installed the tbcheck module, and it filtered out spam very well, but I still did not receive any real trackbacks.

So tonight I've installed the latest development snapshot to see if that makes any difference and have clicked through from sites that link to me, which, according to the documentation in the module's settings page should cause auto-discovery to work out the referring page and list it as a trackback (ie even if the authors of those pages have not conscisously or otherwise pinged my page when they wrote theirs).

I've only had unhelpful suggestions on the general Drupal forums on this issue. Such as "try making your content more unique so people link to you". Well doh - I can see people are linking to me (last week I was listed in the BritBlog round-up, this week I'm nominated for a Blog prize from an organization I belong to), just that these is not being picked up by the trackback module. How can I test it to try and diagnise what's going on?

jockox3@drupal.org’s picture

jockox3@drupal.org commented
Priority: Normal » Critical

Can I ask something quite specific to try to narrow this problem down.

I've now compleely uninstalled the trackback module and reinstalled the 5.x-1.x-dev version. How would I expect the following bit of the help documentation to work:

"If trackback autodisovery is enabled on your website, someone need only visit your post via a link from another website post to have trackback discover the linking site and create the trackback. Trackback auto-discovery also works internally within a website, automatically creating connections between pages which link to each other."

I have been to sites that link to specific posts on my site and clicked on the link to my post and nothing happened. Should I not expect to see a new trackback appearing in my list of trackbacks? Specifically what bit of code is meant to do this "discovery"? Presumably some kind of hook captures an node load event and looks at the referrer URL and looks to see if the page from which the user clicked has a link in it to the node?

I'm now getting a bit desperate. I don't see others having these fatal problems with this module so I'm assuming there's something wrong with my site, but I haven't got a clue where to start. I might even be able to offer a bounty, albeit small as I make nothing out of the sites I develop, to see if I can get this working.

jockox3@drupal.org’s picture

jockox3@drupal.org commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

Okay - well I've taken the plunge and setup a debugging environment and am going to refile this as a bug, since it doesn't seem to be doing what it says it will do "on the tin".

lefou’s picture

lefou commented

Do you have solved your problem. I've the same problem. My site has autodicovery enabled but recieves no trackbacks, even no one when linking to my own blog posts. So, if you found a solution, please post it here, so that I can try it for me too. Thanks in advance.