Internal site links as coments and custom 404

  • Unknown's avatar
    146386q · Member ·

    Hello, nearly Christmas so as a special Mauve Monday we have two for the price of one!

    1 Whenever I include an internal embed or link back to another post – which is every time – I end up with an email notifying me of a comment. It is usually me. I am loathe to just ignore them as, believe it or not, I do, from time to time receive actual comments from real people.
    So, in short, how can I disable this annoying ‘feature’ please.

    2/ Self explanatory really, how can I set up a custom 404 please? Some of my articles are now touching a few years old, as a NEWS not OLDS site I would like to ditch a few and redirect the viewer to something more current / relevant. Doable in .com?

    Cheers
    Bic

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    1 Whenever I include an internal embed or link back to another post – which is every time – I end up with an email notifying me of a comment. It is usually me. I am loathe to just ignore them as, believe it or not, I do, from time to time receive actual comments from real people.
    So, in short, how can I disable this annoying ‘feature’ please.

    This is called a pingback – when one website links to another, it’s common for the linking site to send a notification to the target site, and in the case of WordPress, that notification is treated as a comment on the post/page being linked to.

    What you’re seeing is specifically a self-ping – a pingback to another post/page on the same site.

    You can disable pingbacks completely if you want. You can disable it globally in discussion settings, which will disable it automatically for all future posts, but for existing posts you’ll need to disable them manually by editing each individual post.

    If you just want to avoid self-pings, you can also do that by using the wp.me shortlink that we generate for each post, or else to use a partial URL when linking to posts internally:

    https://wordpress.com/support/comments/pingbacks/#how-to-disable-pingbacks

    2/ Self explanatory really, how can I set up a custom 404 please? Some of my articles are now touching a few years old, as a NEWS not OLDS site I would like to ditch a few and redirect the viewer to something more current / relevant. Doable in .com?

    Custom 404s aren’t possible on a free WordPress.com site – you’d need to be on our Business Plan to do that. Same goes for redirecting individual posts to other posts, which requires the use of a redirection plugin.

    But if you’re game for a more low-tech solution, I’d suggest simply edit the older post, replacing the content with a short blurb and a link to the more recent post you want it to go to instead. It won’t be automatic in the way a redirect would be, but it will have the same end result of directing people landing on older posts, to your more recent content.

  • Unknown's avatar
    146386q · Member ·

    Cheers for that @kokkieh, I will work on the remove self ping option.
    However, if I use the slug only will it still set up the pretty little mini site in a box from the embed function?

    Haha yeah mate, that was my first thought, but then I decided there must be an easier way. Oh, well, low tech here we come!
    thx
    Bic

  • fstat · Staff ·

    if I use the slug only will it still set up the pretty little mini site in a box from the embed function?

    Yes, it’ll work like a normal link you’ll just won’t be pinged.

  • Unknown's avatar
    146386q · Member ·

    Brilliant, thnx
    P

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