As an end user, even if I know what the upstream Discourse source code does, I have no way of knowing what a particular instance of Discourse actually does with the information because I have no way of knowing if they are running modified code. But at a browser level, I can verify whether an HTTP Ping code is included in the HTML that is sent to the browser. Therefore, from an end-user perspective, the only safe answer is for these codes to not be included in the HTML.