Settings tabs missing with error message

@philos1964 It’s possible your place is no longer there. What’s your place id?

@philos1964 I was correct about the Place ID – it is not in the Places database. See Google’s documentation for more details.

Have another look at Google Place ID Finder with your business name to check the Place ID is still correct.

I am changing how the Advanced Tab works so other functionality will appear when the API Key or Place ID are not set or incorrect. This change will appear in the next version.

@designextreme you are right. The people from Google ask me to modify my address, as I do not receive visitors (I’m a website tech). So, my Google location now is an area instead of an address.

But I can not find my Place ID using the Google tool.

My Google Maps location is there: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Philippe+LECOMTE/@47.7975823,-1.231809,7z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0xaf6dd9301443960a!8m2!3d47.8194294!4d1.0109288?hl=fr

But in Google Place ID finder (https://developers.google.com/places/place-id) I can not find my address now…

Do you have any suggestion?

Thanks a lot.

I have found the Place ID, checking code from the button to leave reviews on my GMB.

And it’s the same as before…

ChIJY-iGu7dv5kcRCpZDFDDZba8

@philos1964 Thanks for the details. I’ll have a look into this later.

This issue seems more related to Google Places rather than the plugin itself.

What’s the name of the business? It’s always the best path to finding the correct Place ID.

It’s my name, and I’m not alone with that name (Philippe LECOMTE) but all the Google suggestions I’m getting when using the finder are not about me and my business.

What I do not understand is that all the reviews are correctly displayed in the front end and the plugin settings I did at the beginning (3 reviews randomly displayed) are working fine as well.

Thanks for your support and your time @designextreme ??

@philos1964 Thanks for the update. I think it’s likely that Google decided your name isn’t a “place” (i.e. a business, landmark, street, intersection, etc.).

Please can you check your Google Business listing?

It appears as validated, I did claim my GMB about 3 years ago.

I am considerated as a “service business area”. I have had many mails with the Google customer support about that modification 1 month ago when Google asked me to remove my physical address.

And your plugin was working fine on tuesday, probably even on wednesday, so, I doubt there is a relation between that GMB modification and what the plugin is doing now.

Could it be something with security cutting off some connections between the plugin and an external source? I’m using WP Cerber.

@philos1964 You can see the current raw version of the data by using:

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/details/json?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE&placeid=ChIJY-iGu7dv5kcRCpZDFDDZba8&fields=place_id

I’ll follow this up a little later.

Same as me. I had this message from two days ??

I did not change my id (Google Place), it is the same actually (I just checked on the html file of Google, close to reviews).

The raw version of the date displays an error message:
Status: “REQUEST_DENIED”

I have checked and I am using an API key and a Google billing account.

By the way, after midnight, no more reviews are displaying now.

I have checked all what I can do:
– Billing account: Ok, free trial till december 2020.
– API key: OK
– Place ID: OK (through the Google Reviews button HTML data-pid)

Google has recently changed something. I’ll address this in the next upcoming version. And in the meantime, work out what this error means.

@philos1964 Request Denied means it is either an invalid API Key (free one) or an incorrect Place ID.

@philos1964 Your Place ID is ChIJY-iGu7dv5kcRCpZDFDDZba8 – you can see the data when you search in Google for “Philippe LECOMTE Concepteur de sites Web”, right click on “Leave a Review” and look at the data-pid for the button. Also, this link works:

https://search.google.com/local/reviews?placeid=ChIJY-iGu7dv5kcRCpZDFDDZba8

However, the Google API is still returning “Not Found” whenever a request is made with this Place ID. It may be something relating to regions rather than a specific location. Whatever it is, Google is simply not sending any data and returning a “Not Found” error.

When searching for a fix to this returned data, I found this archived information from Google:

You may occasionally receive a NOT_FOUND status code when you use a saved place ID.

A place ID may become obsolete if a business closes or moves to a new location.

Place IDs may change due to large-scale updates on the Google Maps database. In such cases, a place may receive a new place ID, and the old ID returns a NOT_FOUND response.

Best practice is to refresh your stored place IDs periodically. You can refresh Place IDs free of charge, by making a Place Details request, specifying only the ID field in the fields parameter. This will trigger the Places Details – ID Refresh SKU.

However, this request might also return NOT_FOUND status code. One strategy is to store the original request that returned each place ID. If a place ID becomes invalid, you can re-issue that request to get fresh results. These results may or may not include the original place. The request is chargeable.

I will continue to investigate this issue, but without the source data in some form, I don’t see a viable way to update the reviews. In the meantime, I will see what I can do to present data already stored locally to avoid interruptions when Google stops sending new data.

@designextreme thanks a lot for your time and support.

I confirm this is my Place ID, that is the one I’m using in your plugin and the one I found through the data-pid.

Well, I hope you could find something to help me, your plugin is really good!

@philos1964 I am about to release the next version of the plugin. This will offer a lot more stability to anyone in the future experiencing a similar issue to you. However, because no archive data is stored in the current version, there is no way to restore the reviews and other data that was retrieved at an earlier point.

This update in Google’s Place database seems to be quite recent, so there may be additional information appearing online soon about a possible solution or some kind of fix.

Also, if you’re adept with adding entries manually into the database (e.g. with PHPMyAdmin), then I may be able to provide a string of data to insert in your case (with the new version running). This isn’t something I can offer more than a couple people, however it will mean your front-end will show an archived copy of your reviews. I’m not sure how useful this is going forward though…