How to Turn off trackbacks and pingbacks

Updated By - August 13, 2007

The following article explains how to turn off WordPress trackbacks and pingbacks. In most cases, a WordPress Blog author might decide to disable comments if they are getting an overwhelming amount of spam. However, sometimes the spam can still get through in the form of trackbacks or pingbacks, enabling an abusive user to spam links as comments on the affected blog. Luckily this feature can be easily turned off and or totally eliminated entirely from your WordPress blog in just a few steps.

Disabling Trackbacks and Pingbacks:

  1. Login to your Servers phpMyAdmin control applet.
  2. Now locate and select your WordPress database on the left from the database dropdown list
  3. Now select the SQL tab from the navigation tabs at the top
  4. Within the Run SQL Query box add the following code and click go:

    5. Update wp_posts set ping_status="closed"

  5. If you get an error, check your wp_posts prefix from the database list and change the code to match accordingly.

Note: In addition, if you don't plan to ever use WordPress trackbacks again, you can delete wp-trackback.php from your root directory.