Jafo,
This thing here as you know is perfect, also I would like to warn a lot out there do NOT add a lot of pinging services as a warning LOL. Up to 10 is good, I put in the full list from wordpress's update services, on the forums one day to do a stress test and seen that the thread took about 3 minutes to post and then PHP did a timeout for over 180 seconds.. It posts the new thread if you open another browser you can see for yourself.
So this thing is what you can consider one of the best hacks for a forum.