Feed not Updating

Hey Asig,

Could you send me a link to the page on your site where you’re displaying the feed so that I can take a look?

Many thanks,

John

John,

I sent you the link and the system info yesterday by return email. Did you get it?

Appreciate any help in solving this issue.

Andy

Hey Andy,

I’ve checked our support form submissions and email account and can’t seem to find anything from you. Everything gets funneled into our support ticketing software and I wasn’t able to find anything in there either. Which form on our website did you use to submit it? Are you able to try submitting it again? I’m really sorry about that.

John

John,

my mistake. I received an email copy with the initial answer from you and replied directly to it. Instead, I am posting my feedback below again here.

It is https://www.mycbc.ca.

The facebook feed is on the right side widget area.

The facebook feed that I am connected to is

https://www.facebook.com/groups/679632485515594/

Some things I noted:

The feed will update if I go to the settings of your plugin and change a parameter, then save it. I just did this a couple of days ago so it looks up to date now.

I also have a “Localhost” development copy (with MAMP) of the same website on my computer. While I am not absolutely sure yet, it appears that the feed on the local website updates as expected.

My hosting company is Inmotion.com

Below is also part of the system info from your support section. Let me know if you want me to send you the full system info as well.

Thanks for your help with this.

Andy

## SITE/SERVER INFO: ##
Site URL: https://www.mycbc.ca
Home URL: https://www.mycbc.ca
WordPress Version: 4.3.1
PHP Version: 5.4.45
Web Server Info: Apache
PHP allow_url_fopen: Yes
PHP cURL: Yes
JSON: Yes
SSL Stream: Yes

Thanks Andy. Sorry for the confusion, responding to the email from www.ads-software.com gets sent to [email protected].

I viewed that page but still can’t see where the feed is being displayed on there. I’ve checked the page source code but none of our plugin code is in there. This is what I’m seeing when I view your page: https://postimg.org/image/g9e44kjdr/full/. Could you verify whether you’re seeing the same on your end?

Also, are you using any caching plugins on your site?

Thanks,

John

John,

Thanks for following up. I use a plugin that displays certain widgets only to logged in users. Since you do not have a login for the site you did not see the Facebook feed.

I only realized this based on your feedback above and changed the widget now so that you will be able to see the Facebook feed without the need to log in.

I do not use a caching plugin.

Thanks

Andy

Thanks Andy. It looks like it’s up to date at the moment as the latest post in your group was 4 days ago (screenshot). To help test whether the plugin is updating automatically, are you able to set up a test page on your site and use the following shortcode in it?:

[custom-facebook-feed id=cnn pagetype=page cachetime=1 cacheunit=minutes]

The CNN Facebook page is updated pretty regularly so this will be a good test to see whether the plugin is updating successfully. Please let me know if you’re able to set up a test page so that I can take a look.

I hope you’re having a good weekend!

John

John,

Ok, I set it up. It is the last item in the “About Us” menu.

Andy

Thanks Andy, the test page seems to be updating automatically successfully at the moment (last update 48 minutes ago – screenshot). The next time someone posts to your Facebook Group could you check that test page to see whether your Group feed in the sidebar is updating automatically too?

I hope you’re having a good weekend.

John

John,

A couple of new items have been posted on the Facebook account, but they did not update on the sidebar in the mycbc.ca website. The automatic update is not working.

Also I still left the CNN feed in as requested. It does not appear to update automatically.

Andy

Hey Andy,

Thanks for the update. We’ve been looking into this as we’ve had a few reports of the same issue. It’s difficult to troubleshoot as we’re not able to replicate the issue and the vast majority of users aren’t having the problem. Based on my research and testing it seems like it may be related to a bug in WordPress 4.3 which is causing transients/caches not to clear properly in the WordPress database on some servers. We use the WordPress set_transient function which has always worked great, until the WordPress 4.3 update when we started getting some sporadic reports of this issue. The same seems to happening with other social media plugins too. Rolling back to WordPress 4.2.4 seemed to solve the issue for the user in that thread.

I’m going to file a bug report with WordPress today and do some more testing to see whether I can come up with a manual workaround to force the transients to clear in the database.

Apologies for the issue, we’ll hopefully get this figured out soon.

John

John,

thanks for the quick feedback. Just keep me posted if and when you have a solution.

Andy

No problem, will do.

John

Just adding a “me too” so I get notifications of any follow-ups.

Pro Developer v2.5.11 – clicking Save in the Configuration tab forces a refresh, but it soon stops updating again.

Hey guys,

I’ve narrowed the issue down to the WordPress get_transient function but haven’t had much luck getting a bug confirmation from WordPress on this unfortunately, as it seems to be only happening on some sites and not others which makes it difficult to replicate, despite it also happening with other plugins too which rely on the same WordPress function. Rather than go back and forth with WordPress on this I believe I can just implement a workaround using a cron job which runs every hour behind the scenes and clears the cache that way. I’m planning on doing some more testing today to make sure it works reliably and all going well will plan to release an update with it in either tonight or tomorrow (assuming that my wife who is due with our baby in 3 days doesn’t give birth before then!).

Thanks for your patience on this as I try to find and implement a workaround.

John