Expired Ads Still Show

Hi graftedin,

Sorry that you ran into issues here!

Expired ads should NOT be showing. When they do, it usually means that your hosting service is not running cron (timer) jobs to allow us to remove them from the view.

You might check with them about support for WP Cron jobs and if that fails, try installing this plugin to get a better view of what’s going on: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-crontrol/

A plugin conflict can also hinder the cron jobs as well. You may want to run a conflict test too. Here is an article about how to test for theme and plugin conflicts with AWPCP, which may help pinpoint the issue: https://awpcp.com/forum/faq/how-to-test-for-plugintheme-conflicts/

Thanks I’ll look at those in a bit.

By my way of thinking however that process should also be run manually and/or by just hitting the site. I guess if there r lots of ads I could see wanting to run that at slow periods.

Hi graftedin,

I see where you’re coming from here. But the cron job support for WordPress is nearly universal–only a few hosts have some weird restrictions on that (and they really shouldn’t, because this is core WP behavior required by WordPress). It’s a mechanism that is supposed to be available anywhere and it’s the most reliable way to handle this expiration, so we’ve never needed to do this manually except in a handful of cases where the hosting didn’t support it, or the conflict on the site caused it to break.

Definitely check that out–I suspect you’re seeing one of those two, probably the latter.

Its my server and cron is not the problem.

The problem was when I searched for “AWPCP Expired Ads Still Showing” I couldn’t find anything that would tell me that I need to wait for cron to work. Even if I knew I was looking for cron https://awpcp.com/documentation/ doesn’t say anything about that being related to expiring ads. Cron isn’t even on https://awpcp.com/documentation/ at all.

And I do think having a manual way to run the expire ads proceedure would be helpful for set up and management. And possibly an option to just have that process could run every time wordpress runs would be helpful.

Hmmm…..and now it seems that renewal has a trick to it too?

Hi graftedin,

The reason we don’t document this is because it’s part of the internals of AWPCP and WordPress that we expect are present on a site. We don’t document how to use WP either, but we expect that a site’s ability to do things like present the admin UI work as well.

Did you check the WP-Crontrol plugin? Does that tell you anything about pending or un-run cron jobs here?

Did you try the conflict test?

We can consider adding a manual way to run expired ads but again, this is very much an edge case in our experience. The cron jobs should definitely be executing to handle this for you…

The fact that you’re also seeing issues with renewal tells me cron is likely the source of the issue. We use cron for that, too.

Everything is working fine. Like I said, my server works fine. I just had no idea you were relying on cron rather than something else. And I found through the WP-Crontrol plugin I can run them manually that way.

Thanks.