Does WordPress phone home?

  • astrashe

    (@astrashe)


    21 years, 9 months ago

    I’m playing with WordPress (which I like quite a bit), and I’ve put up a dummy blog to learn about it. It doesn’t have any real posts, just garbage.
    Somehow I’m getting a few outside hits on the blog. I don’t have a real site up at the domain (just the standard Apache manual at this point), and there are no links to the blog’s sub-directory anywhere.
    And someone seems to have subscribed to my RSS feed — every few hours, the feed is polled.
    I can’t figure out how anyone would have found this site. The only answers I can come up with are that (a) someone grabbed the url from a referrer log, (b) WordPress phones home, or (c) there’s a graphic in style I grabbed that queries someone else’s server.
    My subject is bad, because I don’t really think that WordPress phones home. But I’m sort of curious about what’s going on. Has anyone else noticed something similar?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • carthik

    (@carthik)

    21 years, 9 months ago

    It could be feedster, or one of the update services, like blo.gs
    Stop pinging rpc.pingomatic.com and your blog won’t be accidentally discovered.

    Mark (podz)

    (@podz)

    21 years, 9 months ago

    It accesses a graphic here, but that is no more than an image grab – it certainly doesn’t ‘phone home’ in the sense I think you mean.

    Thread Starter astrashe

    (@astrashe)

    21 years, 9 months ago

    Thanks for the help…
    I grepped for pingomatic.com, and didn’t find anything — lots of hits for rpc, though. Is there something I could search for here on the forum to learn more about what’s going on? Is there an easy way to turn that off?
    I’m sure the graphic on the readme file isn’t a problem.

    Mark (podz)

    (@podz)

    21 years, 9 months ago

    Look in Options-Writing and empty the Update Services box.
    Be aware that some search engines spider sites for many pages, and will try to find anything they can get hold of.

    Thread Starter astrashe

    (@astrashe)

    21 years, 9 months ago

    Thanks!
    You guys are great.

    abb

    (@abb)

    20 years, 5 months ago

    I installed ZoneAlarm personal firewall recently, running wordpress 2.0 as localhost diary (its only on my PC nowhere else).

    Everytime I submit a post or edit it, ZoneAlarm tells me my php-cgi.exe wants to go to a destination IP ourside my LAN to 202.183.81.6:DNS, there are a few destinations it seems.

    If I disallow it, I get a blank page on the admin, but my post did get saved if I view my local blog … whats going on??

    abb

    (@abb)

    20 years, 4 months ago

    Oooh ok, I know the reason now, reason: Update services.
    http://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Update_Services

    I think that IP is my local ISP’s gateway.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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