I’ve been making a lot of updates to my site recently, and noticed that one of my go-to plugins—cbnet Ping Optimizer—was no longer needed. I found this out through the plugin’s information page in the WordPress Codex. The tagline currently reads:

Doesn’t do anything. Isn’t needed. Core WordPress handling of Pings is oh-so-fine!

The plugin was designed to prevent sites from being penalized by search engines for “pinging” them too frequently as a result of frequent edits that trigger the pings.

The functionality provided by the plugin is now built into the WordPress core, so there’s no need to install it anymore. But instead of abandoning the project like some authors do, Chip took the time to publish an informative explanation on the functionality, how it’s handled, and why it’s no longer needed.

That’s classy, and the mark of a true professional.