wrong thumbnail images stuck in database

  • Hi,

    we have been using Contextly for awhile now and it has been working great. we make 3 new posts a month and while the posts are being created with hide them from RSS so they do not get picked up in their unfinished state. On our last three posts, Contextly picked them up while we were still in production, even though we had them hidden from RSS. And because we had not yet inserted the featured image for each of the 3 posts, Contextly pulled in our sites main facebook image for that month.

    While that was all a bit confusing and undesirable, I thought it would get sorted out soon as your database refreshed and picked up our featured images. Now it has been a few weeks and the old images are still being displayed as the thumbnails. I even removed the offending image completely from our database to make sure Contextly was not finding is somewhere else, but it has stuck to those three recent posts so the image only exists now in your database.

    So, two questions, 1) why would you pickup our posts before they were added to our RSS feed?, and 2) now that they are in your database, why do they not update to show the featured image?

    I know that we could avoid the first problem by not publishing the post, but it is very convenient for our work flow to publish so that we can easily share the post in production around our editorial team. It has always been enough to hide posts in production from RSS to prevent them from getting picked up by the various services that share our content.

    Here is a link where you can see the thumbnails;

    https://bearleaderchronicle.com/site/entry_043/

    These are the three posts where you will see the same wrong image as the thumbnail;

    M. Wells — Art for Eating
    Hauser & Wirth — Art Farm
    A Train to Haarlem

    Thanks.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/contextly-related-links/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author rsingel

    (@rsingel)

    HI Mcnaden,

    Thanks for the bug report.

    1. I’m not sure why we didn’t pick up the new featured images, but we have a ticket in to update them and figure out why the change wasn’t picked up.

    Just as an FYI, our system updates the metadata — including the image — when a post is updated. Unfortunately, WordPress does not consider changing the featured image alone to be an update.

    So in the future, if you want a post’s image to change, do this: a) change the image b) add and then remove a space in the body of the post c) press update.

    2) You can control the default image we use for posts. Goto Settings->Contextly->Big Settings Button. Then you can choose the image you’d like to use for posts without images.

    3) RSS is only one of the ways we learn new posts. We don’t have a published, but private function. Once a post is published and viewed, we will add it to the system.

    I understand how this is useful to you all, but for a number of reasons, relying on RSS as the source of truth doesn’t make sense for us. We work with a number of publishing systems, including ones that don’t have RSS.

    Thanks again for the report, and we’ll reset the images on Bear Leader.

    Best,

    RS

    Thread Starter mcnaden

    (@mcnaden)

    Great, Thanks for looking into this and for the explanation of how it works. I have done revisions on the three posts I am having trouble with to initiate a database refresh, as suggested.

    Just checking if the problem is resolved. As of a few min ago the thumbnails have still not updated.

    Thanks,
    Mark

    Can you check again? If you are still having issues, can you send an example to [email protected]?

    Thanks.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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