0s come up in RSS feeds

Hi,

It seems rtsocial adds 0’s to the end of the content when js is disabled (like in feeds).

This is definitely a bug in our code. Sorry for that and thanks for reporting it. Unfortunately, today we’re closed for business. We’ll check the code and if a quick fix is possible, we’ll update it promptly. If not, we’ll definitely fix this in a day or two.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks for the help.

Regards.

Hi,

This is actually a little more complicated than we assumed. For some reason, whenever wordpress shows up the post excerpt, it also takes rtsocial that had been added to the post content for display and strips all the html, leaving just the counts and adds them to the excerpt. And after this, rtsocial is added to excerpts, as it should.

Ideally, rtsocial should not be called ‘before’ creating the excerpt. However, this is happening now. Not sure if it is a bug in wordpress or a deliberate change. This will take a little time. Kindly bear with us.

Regards.

And just like that. We fixed it. Kindly upgrade to 3.1.5 and let us know, if you still get the error.

Regards.

Thank you very much for your prompt and thorough reply!

I upgraded to WordPress 3.5 and to rtSocial 2.1.6. Unfortunately, now the social buttons are not appearing at all. In addition, in settings, I am unable to drag the social buttons from “active” to “inactive.”

Thank you very much for your help!

Hi,

I don’t know how this happened. I reverted the code to the earlier one, without the fix for the 0’s and everything works as fine. No 0s getting added any more.

Could you confirm this?

I swear, even I got the 0’s on a couple of test sites, earlier.

Regards

This is not a bug. The reason for this behavior is, the markup is displayed initially with a ‘0’ as a placeholder for the count. Then after the page load, the counts are fetched and injected in place of those 0s by jQuery using the markup’s ids. Hence the plugin is fast as it avoids server side count processing. Since jQuery/JS is probably disabled in feeds, this fails and the 0s continue to show. Even if JS was available and the markup id’s too were in place, I doubt the counts would be fetched as cross origin requests might not be allowed in the aforementioned readers.
You’ll have to get the counts on the server side and add them right when the markup is added, which will obviously kill the plugin’s purpose by making it slow by increasing server side processing. Or use a filter to do this server side fuss only when in the feed context.

Hi Saurabh, and thank you again. I just reactivated the plugin, and the same error occurs in settings: I am no longer able to drag active buttons to inactive. Instead, the entire area is highlighted. This may just be with my machine, but the dragging was working the other day.

I am using WP 3.5 and rtSocial 2.1.6.

Rutwick, thank you also for your response. Your comment seems like it makes sense — that because rtSocial fetches counts after the page load, it would make sense that the RSS feed would capture the 0, 0, 0 that I’m getting.

It may be impossible to fix this. I would love to stay with rtSocial — it is, by far, the fastest social sharing button plugin out there — but am wondering about the zeroes.

Thank you again!

Also, the drag-and-drop problem is about the WP 3.5 update, not with rtSocial. Still frustrating, though! Thank you again.

@iseroma
You’re welcome!

Actually it’s not impossible but a little hacky to fix that issue.

The drag and drop issue could be caused if the markup id’s have changed in the back-end. Try opening the browser debugger by pressing ‘f12’ when dragging and dropping buttons around, switch to the ‘console’ mode and see if any errors are logged when you drag the buttons around.

Let me know and I’ll be more than happy to help!

Hi Rutwick. Thank you again. You and Saurabh are very responsive and helpful. I am going to stick with rtSocial even though the 0s continue to show up in RSS feeds (which doesn’t look too good).

But overall, I am very impressed with rtSocial. It’s really fast, and it looks good. I like the spacing between the buttons. It’s uniform. It’s not like other plugins that way.

The drag and drop issue was a script debugging issue that was a problem with WP 3.5. I fixed it. It had nothing to do with rtSocial.

I am looking forward to the next versions (and new features) of rtSocial. Specifically, I request additional buttons (if possible) and FB shares/likes/total (as others have suggested).

Thank you again for a great plugin and great support.

Yo Iseroma,
My pleasure! Glad I could help. FB will never have ‘likes’ as that means using FB’s JS, which is compromising the plugin’s speed. Let’s hope FB allows likes/like counts via a GET/POST call sometime in the future!

Peace!

Hi,

Facebook from the very beginning has maintained that likes and shares are going to be same thing. In fact, according to Facebook, the share functionality that we use currently in rtsocial, has been discontinued(?) long ago!

Recently, there have been a lot of minor changes in Facebook’s API. One of which says that the current like button will be discontinued (it already has been, apparently in November). This new like functionality will require an app registration but will allow people to build custom like buttons. This means we’ll be able to have a ‘proper’ like button as soon as there is absolute clarity on this.

Other buttons are in the roadmap and the code is being rewritten. However, like I mentioned before, the work’s paused for a while, in favour of some other, more demanding tasks we have at hand. You might want to contribute to the development with your suggestions. In fact, I’d like to invite you to add the 0’s issue in the issue list here: https://github.com/rtCamp/rtsocial/issues. This helps us track and fix issues better.

Finally, thanks for your support and encouragement.

Regards.

Hi,

We managed to fix this finally. Could you update to 2.1.9 and confirm?

Regards.

Everything is perfect now — no 0s at all. Thank you again for all your help!