Apologies for this being long-winded but I’m hoping someone more experienced with WordPress might be able to help me out with this. In the past couple of months I suddenly found myself no longer able to post comments on the preview of a scheduled post, something I used to do on a regular basis. This functionality is something only our admins ever use, our members use a front-end posting form that doesn’t allow for scheduling and there has been no issues posting articles using that method.

At first I thought perhaps it was a plugin or theme update that caused the issue, but it seemed to happen across several of my sites at the same time, with three different versions of WP, a variation in the plugins used between them, some updated and some not. In order to rule out the most obvious possible sources of the issues, I did the usual tests of turning off all the plugins and reverting to a default theme, to no avail. Having presumably ruled out theme or plugin issues, it seems appropriate to post this here.

For the purposes of this post I will discuss only two sites, both having WP 6.4.1 installed. The following are summaries for the Add New Post form on my primary (#1) and secondary (#2) sites.

Site #1 upon opening form:
a) Title field placeholder text = “Add title”
b) Button text = “Update” (static text, never changes)
c) Admin bar and side bar are both visible while the form is open
d) Interface includes a Status dropdown field (Publicly Published, Draft, Pending Review, Privately Published, Password Protected or Archived)
e) Form does not show a confirmation slide-out before scheduling

Site #2 upon opening form:
a) Title field placeholder text = “Add title”
b) Button text = “Publish” (changes to “Schedule…” and then “Schedule” as expected)
c) Admin bar and side bar are both hidden while form is open
d) Interface does not include a Status dropdown field
e) Form shows confirmation slide-out before scheduling

Scheduling a post:

On Site #1 setting a schedule date and time does not change the button text, it always says Update. If the Status dropdown is left as Draft, pressing the Update button only once after setting a schedule results in the post only being saved as a Draft, the Update button must be pressed a second time to actually set the schedule. If the Status dropdown is set to Publicly Published then pressing the Update button only once results in the post being saved as Scheduled. In either case, there is no schedule confirmation slide-out.

On Site #2 setting a schedule date and time changes the button text to “Schedule…” and once pressed it changes to “Schedule” while a slide-out confirms the date and time. Pressing Schedule leads to the article showing as Scheduled in the post list.

In both cases, any attempt to add a comment to the post’s Preview window results in an error message, “Sorry, comments are not allowed for this item.”

Additional information about Site #1:
Traditionally I found that the Add New Post form would have “Add title” as the placeholder text. A few months back that suddenly changed (presumably after either a theme or plugin update or both) and the form would open with “Auto Draft” entered into the title field – rather than the usual placeholder text, which isn’t actually stored in the field. I note that it’s in Auto Draft mode where I would expect to see the button text to read “Update” because the post draft was automatically saved when it was first opened, so then you’re making changes to it. I don’t know why Auto Draft suddenly showed up, but it was only a minor inconvenience due to having to select the words “Auto Draft” and replace them with the desired title. When posts were scheduled they were saved with only one button push and when you went to the post preview, you could add and save comments that members would only see once the scheduled post was published.

Some time in the past several weeks or so, “Auto Draft” disappeared just as quickly as it arrived, returning to the “Add title” placeholder with no actual text entered into the title field upon opening the form – but the button still reads “Update.” I’m not even sure how Auto Draft is turned on or off, although I note that it is not the same thing as Autosave.

Side note:
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my primary site uses wpDiscuz for the comment interface. In researching this problem I found one person on wpD’s support forum who experienced the same thing and was convinced that it was due to a wpD update. He even cited the version number that worked and the version where it stopped working. I can provide that information if it would be useful here. That said, one of my sites has never had wpD installed on it and was refusing to allow comments on scheduled posts, so I tend to dismiss that it is a wpD issue.

As much as it may be a blow to my ego, I’d love to hear that this is a simple problem, that I’ve just got a setting turned off somewhere, but all too often there’s something more at the root of the problem. Thanks in advance to anybody who can offer some advice.

Cheers.

‘Publishing failed. The response is not a valid JSON response.’

When I click back to the posts menu, it shows the page I just edited as ‘Auto Draft’.
This problem goes away when I change the permalink structure from ‘post name’ to ‘plain’.
However, I want to keep my permalink structure as a post name because it is better for the SEO.

This error first came after I installed some new plugins. I tried deactivating them 1 by 1, still, the problem persists.
I ran the ‘Plugin Detective – Troubleshooting’ plugin. It couldn’t find any errors either. The front end of the site works completely fine.

https://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com/auto-draft/

Thanks for the help.

My problem is:

When i click to add a new post, on query monitor screen this is what i see

INSERT INTOwp_posts(post_author,post_date,post_date_gmt,post_content,post_content_filtered,post_title,post_excerpt,post_status,post_type,comment_status,ping_status,post_password,post_name,to_ping,pinged,post_modified,post_modified_gmt,post_parent,menu_order,post_mime_type,guid`) VALUES (1, ‘2021-08-06 10:21:52’, ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’, ”, ”, ‘Auto Draft’, ”, ‘auto-draft’, ‘post’, ‘closed’, ‘closed’, ”, ”, ”, ”, ‘2021-08-06 10:21:52’, ‘0000-00-00 00:00:00’, 0, 0, ”, ”)
UPDATE wp_posts
SET guid = https://mydomain.xxx/?p=151208
WHERE ID = 151208

`

Not always but very often

Any help

Thanks

‘automatisch-gespeicherter-entwurf’ means ‘automatically-saved-draft’.

Knows anyone something about that? Can anybody confirm this?

If not, I have to look somewhere else. Any hints?

Thank you!

Edit: ALL since the update(?) published posts have this content in the guid-field…

I’d like to use Gutenberg on my WordPress site, but every time I try to, it won’t save posts, deleting all the text and just giving me a blank post with a title of “Auto Draft”. Some things I’ve tried to resolve this include:

• using the default Twenty Twenty theme to reduce complications
• using WordPress’ Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin to disable all plugins and test Gutenberg But to no avail

I also get this error in the console when I try to post:

load-scripts.php?c=0&load[chunk_0]=jquery-core,jquery-migrate,utils&ver=5.4.1:3 
GET https://caseypalmer.com/auto-draft/embed/ 404

Any advice? Thanks!