Webmention is a modern reimplementation of things like Pingbacks and Trackbacks. This proposal would be to remove the older standards in favor of the new.
The old standards were abandoned because of abuse and disinterest. But the vision is valuable.
Basic premise...Site A links to site B. Site A tells Site B they've linked to it and it is up to site B to decide what to do with it after verifying it.
That can be parsing the sending site to display a rich comment (Better than WordPress currently showing an unintelligible snippet) or even merely using it in a statistic display.
There is already a plugin to support webmention and a separate one that enhances the response.
Hi David,
Thank you for submitting your feature request.
It might be useful to add some links to your request, for example what Webmention is exactly and to the plugins you mentioned.
https://webmention.net/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/webmention/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/semantic-linkbacks/
I think this could enable a really large number of interesting applications, and is totally in the spirit of our planned focus on providing stable APIs for people to build on.
One example is the
p2
theme that is used heavily inside Automattic and at WordPress.org for any kind of discussion that needs to last longer than a chat conversation. It supports@mentions
for users, but this support is quite hacky and sometimes simply doesn't work. No one has fixed this due to the complexity of the code involved.More info about
p2
: https://p2theme.com/, https://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/