We created a 6 question survey focused on our registration and email validation process and offered 2 cents per completed survey. After only 3 batches of 6 surveys (18 total for a whopping 36 cents!) we identified and confirmed problems with AOL, MSN Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail blacklisting IPs owned by EC2. Other EC2 users had reported similar problems which quickly led us to a solution.

The average time from release to completion for all of the surveys was about 45 minutes and the quality of the responses is very good. No corners were cut by the Automatons. This has been such a success that we will look to make more tests focused on other aspects of our web site.

By default, WordPress Mu pings Ping-o-Matic only and it is no longer possible to add new sites with the wp-admin interface: “Sites get pinged by default. That option [to add other Pinging Services] was removed to simplify the interface.” (donncha)

Thus, adding a new Pinging Service (in this case Google Blog Search Pinging Service) requires an update to the *_options table for each blog. Richard Pendergast clearly shows how to do this over on the DevLounge.

For example,

mysql> SELECT option_value
FROM [secret]_2_options
WHERE option_name = "ping_sites";
+----------------------------+
| option_value |
+----------------------------+
| http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ |
+----------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> UPDATE [secret]_2_options
SET option_value = "http://rpc.pingomatic.com/\nhttp://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2/"
WHERE option_name = "ping_sites";
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0
mysql> SELCT option_value FROM [secret]_2_options WHERE option_name = "ping_sites";
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| option_value |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2/ |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)