Publicize sharing out links to old posts when a comment is left on a post

Greetings! We recently installed Jetpack 2.7 on our site and *love* the ability to auto-publish new posts out to Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Here’s the problem – yesterday it seemed that Publicize started sharing out a link to *old posts* whenever a comment is left on the post, even if the comment is in moderation. We were puzzled yesterday morning when a tweet / FB update / G+ update appeared to an older post. It then happened again an hour or so later.

We had no idea why, but later when I looked in the comment queue I noticed that a comment was left on each of those older posts and had made it through Akismet to be sitting in the moderation queue. Both were in fact spam comments and I clicked the spam link to get rid of them. (Note: We are NOT using Jetpack’s comment features and are just using the regular WP comment system.)

I then tested this by going to an older post that I didn’t mind being shared out and leaving a comment. This time I was logged in as me and so my comment appeared immediately. As happened earlier, the post *was* shared out to Twitter, Facebook and G+.

Now, all of these were posts that were published *before* we installed Jetpack on our server.

I then went and left a comment on a newer post from a few days ago that *was* previously sent out via Publicize. Leaving the comment did NOT cause the post to be shared out to social media.

It seems to me like somehow the “Publicize” component is getting a kick from the comment being left and is noticing that the post being commented upon was never sent out via Publicize… and so it is sharing it out to social media. Perhaps there is a flag in the database saying “Publicized” that is not being set for older posts?

Regardless, this now has us a bit concerned because it would seem that anytime anyone (including spammers) comment on older posts, those posts are being shared out to social media. We don’t want that to happen and if it continues we’re going to have to disable Publicize, which we REALLY don’t want to do!

Have you received any other reports like this? Any suggestions about what we can do? Any tests you want us to run?

We’re using the latest WP 3.8, the latest Jetpack 2.7 and all other plugins are up-to-date.

Thanks in advance,
Dan

UPDATE: – It happened again this morning with another comment on an older post seeming to trigger that old (2012) post to be shared out.

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