Today, while doing a minor security upgrade, Pingoat banned all sites that tried to ping. Sorry about that But in that five minutes, I got around 200 emails complaining and I had to reply to all of them!

If you have a real good blog and you get a "blacklisted" warning, it might be because of pure computer miscalculations! Please understand that the software might sometimes blacklist innocent blogs.

No need to panic, just drop me a mail and I'll clear you off. After all, I am a single person with only two hands! As you see, Pingoat is still "beta", that means its still in development mode. Once its out of the beta, you'll enjoy continuous, clutterless service. Till then, please bear with me

Thank you for your co-operation.

Since yesterday's security upgrade, a lot of things have been happening around here. The first this is that I see a huge dip in spam Out of every 1000 pings served, only around 10 or 20 are spam. I know that this is temporary, but Pingoat'll do its best to kill spam.

Threats
Regardless the many a number of 'thank you' mails I received yesterday, there were a dozen 'threats' too Obviously they were spammers?? One said that Pingoat should learn to serve 'all kinds of blogs' else it wont go very long. But I am really sorry. Pingoat wont process blogs that are spam.

If by any chance, you get a 'black listed' or 'trying to spam' warning while pinging your good and clean blog, drop me a mail and the issue will be resolved very immediately. Please remember that Pingoat is still in beta and it might have glitches !

Thank you.

Spam and splog! I just hate them! I now have to manually verify 465 pages (with 100 entries on each page) of blacklisted blogs and mark them as spam manuall. Now how cool is that! This is the spam that gets past the default antispam measures.

Anybody have any ideas? Seriously, like voluenteering for the 'marking as spam' project?

The crackdown
Yes, atleast 10,000 domains have been blacklisted! (and growing..) The security measures have been tightened. I expect the spam to be cut by atleast 70% ( We soon might have a cpatcha on the homepage! )


Update
Innocents blacklisted!
I apologised to all those good and innocent blogger's who got blacklisted after the security upgrade! That was not intentional, but purely accidental. If you have been blacklisted, drop me a mail and you will be immediately cleared.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update
Important: New measures
My inbox is flooded with email from innocent people! I'm processing the requests immediately upon the recipt of email

Please understand that you wont get blacklisted for frequent pings. Even if you ping 10 times an hour, Pingoat wont blacklist you. (you'll get a too frequent pings error though). Blogs get blacklisted when they contain objectionable content. Blogs created by bots / with random content only with the intention of reaping adsense revenues are blacklisted.

It seems there has been something wrong Icerocket rpc server. They accept only one parameter now (blog_url). When the blogname and blogurl was passed, the server returned an error saying "Expecting two parameters (3 provided)"! Weird.

And Technorati is now looking into the issue Pingoat has with TR (pingoat's pings weren't been accepted by Technorati). It'll be resolved asap. Routine checkups revealed that everything was working fine and all the pings were being delivered properly.

PS: I am thinking of a new addition to Pingoat, an RSS submitter

I am happy (again) to announce the addition of around 10 new services! This time, every service has been categorised properly. "General / Non english services / Special services".

Now Pingoat supports a decent 64 services

Edit
Just wanted to add a little statistics Pingoat received over 10,0500 pings since July 21. Out of this, only 13800+ pings were served. The rest were SPAM :| Something really needs to be done regarding this spam. (I'm working on a paper now 'How to prevent blog spam' )

Suspicions, Suspicions, Suspicions.. Lately, I've seen people asking 'How/Why' pingoat is pinging those services so fast? Some people even sent me mails asking 'Is Pingoat really sending pings afterall?' ! The answer is YES. Pingoat is sending pings properly. But sorry, I cant reveal the secret of its speed

PS: It seems there is some problem with Technorati's xml-rpc server. Pingoat is getting an error 403 while pinging. I've mailed Technorati, but no response yet.

Yeah, I just added 5 more services to the Pingoat service list ! Pingoat now pings 54 services!

Newly added services
veneblog.com

(Special services)
blogshares.com
geourl.com
rubhub.com
memigo.com

PS: (boastology.com was removed from the list due to technical reasons)

I just added Newsgator to the Pingoat service list. ( Earlier, there were some problems with Newsgator ) Now Pingoat has a total of 50 services in its elephant (er, Goat) list Want more? Pingoat will be adding a couple of new services very very soon !

Pingoat just took it one step ahead! I am happy (+proud) to announce the opening of Pingoat Google sitemap generator ! Now you can create Google sitemaps for your site with once click ! Pingoat can even upload the sitemap to your webserver automatically and then ping google That was a real rush, creating and deploying the tool in three hours !

Check out the all new 'Pingoat Google sitemap generator'
http://pingoat.com/goat/google_sitemap

For those who dont know what Google sitemaps is:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

Pingoat enters phase two ! Yep, the Pingoat engine has been fully revamped for better performance. The new system can ping services via xml-rpc format, or a simple get/post or even a custom method! Now all I need to do to add a new service is to add its url, specify the ping method (with optional variables like port,vars,type etc..)! Its that easy ! So please keep your eyes open for new services and do let me know

And functionality wise, there's been two MAJOR improvements.
1) Added a 'Select all' button
2) The ping submission on the homepage is now via 'get' method. That means you can bookmark the ping page (after submission) and ping when ever you want, by calling the bookmark !
3) Arranged the service list into three columns for better accessbility
4) Pingoat remembers your blog name/url and the services you pinged

A couple of non-functional ping services have been removed and in compensation, these new services has been added

1.IceRocket.com
2.newsisfree.com
3.Weblogs.com Audio RPC (for podcasters)
4.boastology.com/recent

Newsgator rpc server seems to have some problems, but I hope the very friendly Newsgator man, Greg Reinacker will soon sort them out for Pingoat.

And I've compiled a small list of Blog directories and search engines where you can submit your blog (one time submission). It can be found here : http://pingoat.com/goat/resources


Enjoy! And please do report errors and glitches you find..

My apologies to all Pingoat users As you might have noticed, Pingoat has been treating every ping and submission as Spam for the past two days. What actually happened was that a single host spammed Pingoat so hard that somehow to 'ban list' messed up and Pingoat wouldn't accept any pings. The issue has been resolved and everything is working fine as ever.

I regret the incoveniences caused. Thank you for your understanding..

Finally the Pingoat XML-RPC server is up and running! No more manual pinging, no more hassles. Make your blog client automatically ping Pingoat every time it is updated. The Pingoat xml-rpc server has been designed to accept a huge volume of pings so everybody's ping will be processed without and descrimination

Pingoat XML-RPC server
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

Pingoat RPC server help
http://pingoat.com/goat/rpc_help

How Pingoat server works
http://pingoat.com/goat/how


And now Pingoat remembers all the services you select (while pinging) on the homepage and the next time you come along, it'll automatically select your previously chosen services for you