Problem with Automated Twitter Posts

  • When our WordPress site was created in 2011, it was set up to share each post automatically on Twitter. But this was apparently NOT done with a plug-in, as most people use today. Our original developers are all long gone now, and we urgently need to disable our current automated Twitter posts, and change the way we post to Twitter, but we can’t figure out where/how the current automatic Twitters posts are being generated, so we can’t disable them. I’ve done a bit of digging, and it looks like old versions of WordPress had a fairly simple toggle to send automatic posts to Twitter (for example, https://en.support.wordpress.com/twitter/ gives instructions for doing this by clicking My Sites -> Sharing ) but our current version of WP does not have “My Sites” in the dashboard menu. Is it possible that our site was set up this way, and has been doing this on auto-pilot for the last 8 years, even though there no longer appears to be a way to access this setting on WP? And if that’s the case, how do we now turn it off? Or, if this isn’t the case, what other mechanisms might be sending our posts to Twitter? Again, it does NOT appear to be any of our installed plugins (we’ve been through all of them at least a dozen times). TIA for any suggestions…

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

  • No, not like that. The Sharing option was never part of self-hosted WordPress. It is on WordPress.com.

    Your site is using Yoast SEO, and it has Twitter tags in the header. It also has a link to a feed at the bottom: Tweets from https://twitter.com/Feed_Buzz/lists/larchmontbuzztwitterfeed
    This page talks about the option under Settings > Writing for what sites get notified when you post: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Update_Services

    Thread Starter larchmontbuzz

    (@larchmontbuzz)

    Yes, thanks for pointing out the WordPress.com confusion. So definitely not that. But the feed linked to at the bottom of our page is the feed from people we follow that’s embedded in the front page of our site. (So it’s just tweets coming in to us…not our WordPress posts automatically going out to Twitter.) And it was set up several years later than the automatic posts of our stories to our Twitter feed.

    Also, just checked the Writing settings, and the only thing under Update Services is rpc.pingomatic.com

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by larchmontbuzz.

    It might be the publicize settings in Jetpack if you have Jetpack installed. If so then you can usually tweak those by going into any post and clicking the publicize buttons or links.

    I’m thinking the reference to ‘My Sites’ is for a Multisite install which you probably don’t have. Oh, after looking at the article you mentioned that is for a site hosted on WordPress dot com. You are not on WordPress dot com so that article doesn’t really apply to your website.

    One other place to look is the plugins directory… You’ll be looking for something like ‘Twitter’ and the word ‘share’. If you find such a plugin you can disable it and the automatic posts should stop.

    Be careful as you do seem to have a plugin for Instagram sharing and integrations. You don’t want to break that.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by JNashHawkins.
    Thread Starter larchmontbuzz

    (@larchmontbuzz)

    Thanks. Someone else already pointed out the WordPress.com confusion, so it’s not that. We do have Jetpack installed, but not activated, so it’s not that either. We also have Yoast SEO installed and activated, but the Twitter cards there are not activated (though I did activate them this morning, for the first time, just to see what would happen). Never activated before today, though, so that’s not it either. Also checked the Twitter settings in the Sharing section of individual posts, and all that’s there are blank lines to specify alternates/overrides for title, description and image – but nothing that would govern the automatic sharing of each post. And, again, we’ve been through all our other plugins, too, MANY times, and there are none that do Twitter sharing.

    I don’t use Twitter, so I don’t know, but is it possible to set it up from that end? The site is telling pingomatic, and that could go to Twitter, which then goes to your site to get what to tweet. just guessing

    How about the Buffer site and APP?

    And is it possible you have a ‘helpful’ fan somewhere who is posting your Tweets via your Social Sharing buttons?

    Or maybe a script running at https://ifttt.com/twitter

    And a really wild guess but maybe turn off XMLRPC?

    Here’s a plugin to do that. Do watch that you don’t kill any other services that might depend on XMLRPC. https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/disable-xml-rpc/

    Thread Starter larchmontbuzz

    (@larchmontbuzz)

    I just looked at the Pingomatic website, and it says it pings various search engines to tell them your site has been updated…but their list doesn’t include any social media. And, no, you can’t set up Twitter to pull in things automatically from WP.

    Thread Starter larchmontbuzz

    (@larchmontbuzz)

    @jnashhawkins Definitely not a helpful fan. Know that for sure. Probably not any of those others, either. Now, a new development – I enabled Twitter Cards on Yoast SEO for the first time, and two things happened: 1. the automatic posts from WP to Twitter seem to have stopped. (Our newest WP posts today did not post to Twitter as they always had before.) and 2. All the old links in previous Twitter posts, which had been created by whatever system was doing them, now show photos (as per the Yoast Twitter Cards) instead of just text links as they had before, and they have converted from goo.gl shortlinks to t.co short-links (which we did want to do, but hadn’t yet told anything to do). This is weird…but also good. Looks like we’re at least half way to a fix.

    I wonder if JetPack might have been configured for Twitter then disabled but still ‘leaking’ twitter shares? A long shot but possible.

    And when you enabled the Twitter Cards maybe that overwrote some other function from the disabled Jetpack ‘fixing’ part of your feed???

    Maybe JetPack and/or Yoast support might have some insight into this.

    One more thought… if you ever had Jetpack enabled then you would have had an account at WordPress dot com which connects your self hosted WordPress website to the features available at WordPress dot com via JetPack. I wonder if ‘reader’ at WordPress dot com figures into this and maybe your account at WordPress dot com might be sharing your posts that it sees from your self hosted site?

    Do you remember ever having an account at WordPress dot com? Or possibly a staffer or a developer doing this for you at one time?

    This is pretty far fetched but I’m scratching my head on anything else.

    Thread Starter larchmontbuzz

    (@larchmontbuzz)

    I was wondering something similar. I also just now enabled JetPack and its auto-post-to-Twitter feature, so we’ll see if that and Yoast’s Twitter Cards together can start doing things the way we’d like them done. Will know more tomorrow after we put up a few more posts. Thanks for noodling on this!

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
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