I’d been wondering why my Trackback listing hadn’t changed in over a month. Granted, fewer people are “doing it” than in the past, but, still …
So I tried posting something to another of my blogs, pointing back at a post here.
The post session gets an odd message:
Odd number of elements in hash assignment at (eval 35) line 7. line 268.
That repeats serveral times.
The Activity Log, in turn, shows:
Ping ‘https://www.hill-kleerup.org/blog/mt/mt-tb.cgi/6982’ failed: HTTP error: 404 Not Found
Hrm. Especially since I can see that trackbacks are turned on for that post, and that’s the value that comes up for that page to ping to.
Time for a little research.
UPDATE: Well. It would help if the file mt-tb.cgi actually existed. Hmmmm.
UPDATE: Which may be related to this thread.
UPDATE: Okay, renamed my mt-tb.cgi file (on my hard drive, then uploaded it) and updated the mt.cfg file to match it (see here). And now Trackback works.
How … annoying.
Server down or trackbacks down? Hmm, let me think…
No problem at all with trackbacks being down to avoid the server being down. Only problem is with finding out about it by noticing, long after the fact, that the service has been disabled and digging out the reason why myself.
And, that said, I’m assured that HM did not delete or otherwise remove the mt-tb.cgi file in my MT install. Not sure how it *did* vanish, but I’ve replaced it (renamed) and will monitor it on occasion. Hopefully Evil Spammers (upon whom be any number of nasty skin ailments) will not cause further problems for my host, with my account at least.
We typically rename it and chmod it to 000 so it’s not executable. The rename includes a little message to the user like “use anti spam measures!” I guess it would depend on your FTP client if that makes it unviewable or not…it shouldn’t be since it’s still owned by your user. It is possible someone on the *COUGH* night shift chowned it to “root” as well, which WOULD prevent you from seeing it. But we’re about to HANDLE that issue. *growl*
Possible — I tried looking with a couple of FTP clients, showing hidden files, to see if I could see it. If it got chowned to a different owner, I could see it vanishing that way.
I didn’t try copying over an unrenamed copy, which I suppose would have demonstrated it one way or the other.
Ah, well. No big deal, at the moment.
I was wondering why the last couple of trackbacks to your site failed. Now I know.
It was your link to my Foxy post yesterday (heh), and a lack of trackback, and my wondering if it were something you weren’t doing or a problem on my site, that led me to experiment.