Sometimes I go on fanficrants just to check and see if people are talking about me. It's the same reason why I scoured through that Tumblr of bad cover art -- I was for sure thinking I was going to appear on there. I was super grateful not to show up.

-Wordpress Problems: So I've been receiving a ton of ping spam on my self-hosted WordPress --11,000+! -- and when I deleted a ton of them and tried to empty the trash it gave me a 505 message and I just wanted to punch my computer right in its smug screen face.

Anyways, as a work around, I installed the WP-Optimizer plugin. Then I went through and filtered my comments by ping (I guess at some point I allowed pings and trackbacks and that's why everything's screwed up) and marked every single one Unapproved. Then all I had to do was use WP-Optimizer to clear Unapproved Comments and it wiped them all out. Seriously, over 10 MB of crap got wiped out.

I went into my Settings -> Disscussion and unticked "Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).

Hopefully that will fix a lot of my problems. Otherwise, because I've shut off pingbacks, they'll go straight into my Spam folder and WP-Optimizer can clear that out too. It's a lot easier than hitting Empty Spam and getting a 505 :/