Pinging?

[JD]

Could someone tell me all I have to know about pinging in one easy lesson??

So pinging is when you publish a post on WP and it sends out 'pings' to certain sites to let them know your blog is updated yeh?

So I notice some of you guys say to turn off auto pinging in wordpress because you can get banned? Whats all this about, who bans you and why do they do this?

Do I need to turn off pinging on my blogs and manually ping???? And from what i understand now, if I use the post timestamp on wordpress I need to use a spacial ping plugin as wordpress wont ping when it puts those posts live?

thanks guys