Be honest: Have you ever used the “Send Trackbacks” box on the WordPress post editing screen? No?
Have you even noticed that such a box exists at all? It’s likely pushed down quite a bit, especially if you’re rocking Thesis, which adds a few additional meta boxes which may push the trackbacks box farther down the page.
You can easily hide the “Send Trackbacks” box via the “Screen Options” panel near the top of the page, but that’s a simple style trick; WordPress will still have to process and output that panel every time you load the add or edit post screens.
To do away with the box altogether, simply drop the following code into your custom_functions.php
file:
/**
* Eradicate the "Send Trackbacks" post meta box
*/
function brazenly_remove_trackback_meta_box() {
remove_meta_box( 'trackbacksdiv', 'post', 'normal' );
}
add_action('admin_menu','brazenly_remove_trackback_meta_box' );
Screen options tab works nice as well, but thanks for the code as very useful on multi author sites. So admin may disable the thing for everyone.
The difference is that the screen options only hide the panel on the client side. It’s still processed and sent to your browser (hide one, refresh the page, then search for it in the page source to confirm, if you want). This code saves that processing time & bandwidth, even if it is a small savings.