MovableType: Avoid Multiple Repeated Pings

If you are frequent visitor of Project Petaling Street(PPS) – central site for Malaysian bloggers, you will notice that there are many repeated pings for the same entry from MovableType(MT) bloggers.

Strangely, the repeated pings only come from certain sites(servers). For instance, my MT hosting site(Frens.net) does not ping repeatly.

Just out of curious, I searched about the MT Ping.

Cause?
According to this MT forum thread, it is caused by ping time out problem. When you ping a site, MT will wait for certain period(default: 10 seconds) for ping reply(Pong!). If MT doesn’t get the reply, it will re-ping.

Why only happend to certain sites?
I guess it is due to the locations and connection speed between the sender and receiver web servers. The PPS is hosted in HongKong, according to Whois Source. If your blog site server has slow ping to HongKong side, chances are your MT will repeat the ping.

Solution?
First of all, I haven’t try the solution by myself(since my server no problem on it). These are consider as possible solution. Please let me know if it works. :)

There are two ways to solve the multiple ping, at client side(ping sender) and server side(ping receiver).

At Client Side, the owner of MT blog can edit mt.cfg and change the PingTimeout value.

1. Edit mt.cfg(not mt.cgi)
2. Find: # PingTimeout 20(around line #220)
   Replace it with: PingTimeout 30
   Note: Remove the “#” to un-remark the line. Increase or decrease the PingTimeout value to get the best(lowest) working value

For Server side, there is a MT hack called Avoid Duplicate Trackback Pings 1.0. I am not sure if the hack will work for PPS or not because PPS is using another ping plugin to receive pings from blog sites.

Thought:
Hope this tip works and helps some of the MT bloggers. If you have other solution, please let me know. Also, please tell your other MT friends if this tip works for you. :)