Blogger Christian Bolstad found a new feature in WordPress 2.8, undocumented and not among the release notes in the Codex. Basically, it changes the notification behavior of WordPress, from notifying ping services like Pingomatic and others you might use automatically when publishing a post or editing a previously published post, to doing a once an hour notification using the built-in pseudo cron.

So why is this a bad thing? [Note! Bullets updated below! See comments for more.]

• It delays updates to the RSS feed to services relying on pinging.
• Delaying pings delaying all services depending on pinging.
• Delaying pinging to middle man services means that syndication of the links will be delayed.

My guess is that this feature was implemented to speed up the admin interface. After all, if you’ve got a bunch of services to ping, publishing or editing a published post would mean that you’d have to wait while the admin interface parsed through the pinging. read more