Editor’s note (March 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2009, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
Back in 2009, we talked about a quiet change in WordPress that most users never noticed. WordPress changed its update pinging behavior from every post to hourly, reducing how often a site can report new content to services like Ping-O-Matic.
This was a reasonable technical decision. The problem was not the decision itself. The problem was, no one was telling anyone.
There is no announcement. There is no change log visible to regular users. There is no explanation on the panel. Bloggers noticed something was wrong, started digging, and eventually put it together themselves. For a platform that built its reputation on community trust and open source goodness, this was a strange way to operate.
In the grand scheme of things, that moment was small. But it planted a seed of question that would grow stronger over the next decade and a half: Who does WordPress actually cater to?
What Ping actually does – and why it matters
To understand why the 2009 change frustrated people, it helps to understand what WordPress ping is for. When you publish a post, WordPress would trigger an XML-RPC notification to update services, specifically Ping-O-Matic, which then relays the signal to search engines and blog directories. It was the internet’s way of saying: there is something new, come and see.
WordPress’ own documentation describes the system clearly: update services “process the ping and update their property indexes with your update.” For the first bloggers, it was a real infrastructure. Getting indexed quickly was important for traffic, community, and feeling your words were reaching people.
The switch to hourly ping was technically an anti-spam measure. Sites that were constantly reposting were flooding their ping services with noise. The pull made sense. But bloggers who rely on rapid indexing, especially creators of news-adjacent content, were quietly at a disadvantage without an explanation for why their coverage had changed.
This is not a technical fault. This is a lack of communication. And the difference is very important.
The model that never goes away
It would be satisfying to say that WordPress has learned from that moment. In the summer of 2009, a small controversy over ping led to a more transparent, communicative platform. In a sense it did. WordPress has become more deliberate about publishing release notes, developer updates, and roadmap posts via make.wordpress.org.
But the fundamental tension between the power of the platform and its accountability to the people who depend on it has not gone away. He was just waiting for a bigger stage.
That stage came in 2024. What started as a public disagreement between Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine over trademark use has turned into something the WordPress community has never seen before. WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine from accessing plugin and theme updates, leaving millions of websites potentially vulnerable. Automattic then took control of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, one of the most used tools in the entire ecosystem, and pushed updates to millions of users without their express consent.
What It started in 2024 the disagreement over the use of the mark turned into litigation and wide-ranging consequences for the public. More than 150 Automattic employees resigned. Long-term contributors have discovered their accounts have been blocked. The community that gave life to WordPress was treated like cannon fodder, as one observer put it.
The ping throttling of 2009 and the WP Engine crisis of 2024 are not the same event. But they rhyme. Both involved successive decisions about infrastructure that millions of people depend on without adequate transparency or community dialogue. The size was different. The lesson was the same.
What bloggers and creators really need from platforms
There is a tendency in our industry to treat platform decisions as purely technical or purely commercial. The engineers had to prevent spam, so they stopped the pings. The lawyers had to defend a trademark, so they stepped up the case. These frameworks aren’t wrong—they’re just incomplete.
It is the human class that is left behind. Bloggers who build their readership using tools they trust behave predictably. Developers who put years of work into an ecosystem they believe in. Agencies running on a platform that all of their client businesses can no longer fully trust.
Platform decisions are community decisions. And communities don’t just need good outcomes—they need to be part of the process that creates them.
This is not idealism. This is practical. When WordPress quietly changed its ping behavior in 2009, the backlash was modest but real. Discontent was especially palpable when Automattic made sweeping moves in 2024 without real public consultation. long-term contributors who once believed that WordPress was built on collaboration and transparency. Once eroded, trust is not restored in the software update schedule.
The lesson for content creators is about diversification and vigilance—realism, not paranoia. Understanding how your publishing infrastructure works, what dependencies you have, and how platform decisions affect your reach is no longer optional knowledge. It’s part of being a serious digital publisher.
The ping question in 2025 and beyond
The technical landscape of ping has also changed significantly since 2009. Many of the original ping services that WordPress users relied on are now deprecated or return invalid responses. Tests have shown that extended ping lists over the years, only a few endpoints still provide valid answers — and loading your WordPress installation with dozens of dead URLs will only slow your site down without any indexing benefit.
Today, Google and other major search engines are much more sophisticated at discovering and indexing new content than they were when Ping-O-Matic was a meaningful lever. Search Console, sitemaps, and internal linking strategies have largely displaced pinging as the primary mechanism for rapid indexing. Hourly regulation, which caused so much frustration in 2009, is practically a non-issue for most modern publishers.
But this evolution did not happen by announcement. It happened gradually, and bloggers who didn’t keep up with it were stuck optimizing for long-standing infrastructure.
What this history really wants from us
There’s a line in all of this that I think deserves to be called outright: the relationship between creators and the platforms they publish on has always been uneven, and doing otherwise leads to bad decisions.
WordPress—for all its genuine contributions to the democratization of publishing—is not a neutral utility. It is a program driven by people with vested interests, financial pressures and blind spots. This was true in 2009 when an engineer made the decision to ping without considering the consequences of the communication. That was true in 2024 when a legal dispute turned into a community crisis. The next argument will be true in whatever form it takes.
None of this is to say that WordPress isn’t worth building on. That’s pretty much still the case for most publishers. What this means is that the stance of a serious content creator cannot be one of passive dependence. You should understand your tools, monitor platform developments, maintain optionality where possible, and treat your publishing infrastructure as you would any other critical business dependency: with clear eyes.
The 2009 ping story was a minor one. His main question is whether this platform respects the people who depend on it. — is still asked today, which explains why it’s worth remembering.
