Related Posts bug

  • Resolved michaelcaswell

    (@michaelcaswell)


    1 year, 3 months ago

    I’m experiencing an anomaly with Related Posts. It seems to occur specifically when two or more posts have identical titles.

    As an example, I have two posts, both with the title “Engagement Portrait in City Park”… I use the Secondary Title plugin to include the couples’ names, in this case “Zoe and Bernardo” and “Maggie and Levi”. At the bottom of Zoe and Bernardo’s post, I see the three posts under Related Posts. Two of them are fine, but the one that links to Maggie and Levi’s post is messed up.

    For that one, it displays the title as “Zoe and BernardoEngagement Portrait in City Park”. There are three things of note with this.

    1. It’s a link to Maggie and Levi’s post, but it’s appending “Zoe and Bernardo” to the beginning of the title (Zoe and Bernardo is THIS post).
    2. No space between the names and the post title
    3. Secondary title doesn’t seem to be normally used for related posts, it’s only in these cases where the post title is identical (and again, it appends the wrong name, the one of the post being currently viewed, not the one that is being linked to).

    Now, I realize that identical titles is an SEO no-no, and for some of these affected posts (where there are just a handful involved), it’s no big deal to make variations of the title, which I’d want to do anyway to optimize for various search phrases. But there are several venues that I have dozens of posts for, and it’s becoming untenable to try to come up with that many unique variations of what is a pretty straightforward title… some of them are reading quite awkwardly. I’m setting the less important ones to noindex, and also using Yoast’s ability set the title tag of the page to be different than the post title, but these don’t help the problem of related posts not displaying correctly.

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

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 20 total)
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  • Plugin Contributor Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hi there, @michaelcaswell,

    Thanks for the thorough explanation of the problem. It sounds like a tricky one to untangle, so we need to narrow down the possible source of the issue methodically. Apologies in advance for my long reply.

    I’ll start with some questions:

    • are the “wrong” related posts tagged and categorised accordingly? Related Posts relies on that to share the most relevant posts
    • are there any other examples of this issue that you can share? That would help us identify a pattern.

    ****
    Upon checking your site (beautiful photos, by the way), I noticed that Jetpack isn’t well connected. Having a working connection can help us troubleshoot the issue. The connection is broken by a block happening at your server’s end – you can see it on this page, which Jetpack uses as an endpoint to “transfer” data between your server and Jetpack’s:
    https://michaelcaswell.com/xmlrpc.php?for=jetpack

    There are a few ways to fix the connection and get rid of the block:

    • Report this to your hosting provider, and ensure our IPs range is in your allowlist
    • Check for any security/caching plugins you may have enabled, and try temporarily disabling them to see if it fixes the problem.
    • Search for any firewall on your server-side that might be blocking the communication with the xmlrpc.php file – your host should be able to help you with that.

    ****
    There may be something else installed on the site that’s causing problems. Let’s go through the following troubleshooting steps to check for that:

    • Temporarily deactivate all plugins except Jetpack to see if there’s a plugin conflict. If the issue is resolved with all other plugins deactivated, you can reactivate plugins one by one to discover which plugin is causing the problem.
    • Temporarily switch your theme to Twenty Twenty-Three and see if the problem persists.

    ****
    Hope that’s all clear! Look forward to your reply, and thanks in advance for your cooperation in sorting that out with us!

    Thread Starter michaelcaswell

    (@michaelcaswell)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hi Stef,

    Thank you for the prompt response! I should clarify though, what I’m seeing is not “wrong” posts being listed (like a post for Venue A showing related posts that have nothing to do with Venue A)… my posts are indeed tagged and categorized, and all of the posts shown under related posts are relevant.

    The problem is that in this one particular circumstance (where multiple posts have identical titles), it’s appending a secondary title (it appears that jetpack related posts does not ordinarily show the secondary title), plus it’s the wrong secondary title (it shows the secondary title of the post that is currently being viewed, not the one being linked to). That link is to a different post (one that is correctly matched as being related), but that link text includes the secondary title of the current post. Sorry, it’s confusing to explain!

    The pattern is very clear, and I can readily replicate the issue… all I need to do is give two posts the same title, and if related posts matches them up, the problem will be visible. Change the title on one of them, and the problem goes away. Here’s another example:

    https://michaelcaswell.com/blog/deva-cody-wedding/

    Under related posts, there’s a link to the wedding of a different couple (Marissa and Bradley) at this same venue, but the link text reads “Deva and CodySouthern Oaks Wedding” (again, Deva and Cody is not the secondary title of the post that this link goes to, that’s the secondary title of the currently viewed post). The other two links on that page read fine (because their titles are different). If I change Deva and Cody’s post title, or Marissa and Bradley’s post title, that incorrectly displayed secondary title will go away.

    So, again, the workaround is to not have any identical post titles. But I’m having a very difficult time coming up with enough unique variations of some of these frequently-posted venues.

    My blog is on a multisite server and is pretty tightly controlled (Showit), so I have limited ability to make changes for troubleshooting. But I’ll pass along what you said about the connection problem.

    Thanks, and let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help you.

    Plugin Contributor Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hi there, @michaelcaswell,

    Thanks for the very thorough explanation of the issue. I am glad to read that I have gotten it right (phew!) and that the tagging and categorising are correct – that rule out an issue related to that which is good news.

    At this point, given the issue seems to be tied to the dupe titles, it’d be interesting to understand where this is getting triggered – Jetpack, or another plugin. That is why the troubleshooting is important at this stage. Depending on the outcome of the testing, we’ll be able to address the correct team (whether is Jetpack or a third-party plugin we can cooperate with).

    I 100% understand the trouble of testing the plugin the way I explained on a production site (not to mention on a multisite network!), so maybe you can get a staging service where you can do testing without affecting the live site. You can ask your host about this. If they don’t give you a staging site, you could try WP Staging or Duplicator:

    https://ww.wp.xz.cn/plugins/wp-staging/
    https://ww.wp.xz.cn/plugins/duplicator/

    To troubleshoot the theme, you can use a plugin that only switches the theme for the current user (leaving it as normal for any visitors), linked below: https://ww.wp.xz.cn/plugins/theme-switcha/

    If you decide to try this initial troubleshooting, let us know what you find, and we can go from there.

    Meanwhile, if you want to keep working with the workaround of getting different titles, you can prompt this to the AI assistant: https://jetpack.com/support/improve-your-post-titles-with-ai-assistant/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

    Thread Starter michaelcaswell

    (@michaelcaswell)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Thank you again for your attention to this.

    Unfortunately, I have no ability to install any plugins beyond what Showit has preinstalled, and I cannot even switch themes. But I did try disabling all other plugins except Jetpack (and Secondary Title, of course), and the problem remained.

    I passed along to their tech support your comment about the connection problem between their server and Jetpack, and they are looking into that.

    Plugin Contributor Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hey @michaelcaswell,

    Thanks for reporting the connection issue to your host – let’s have this sorted out as this can help better investigate the Related Post problem.

    The fact that the issue persists upon disabling other plugins might indicate that we might be able to take action on that: we might file a report to our developers once we have checked the site a bit better with the working Jetpack connection 🙂

    In the meantime, would my suggestion to avoid creating duplicate titles with the AI generator work for you? I’m curious to know if that would help at this stage.

    Thread Starter michaelcaswell

    (@michaelcaswell)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Yes, the AI generator could help, though it’s not totally necessary… I can (with some effort) come up with alternative titles. But there still leaves a chance that (particularly for locations where I have quite a few posts) I could miss some.

    Plugin Contributor Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hey @michaelcaswell,

    I see what you mean! Let’s fix the Jetpack connection first, so we can check if it’s time to escalate it to our developers. Keep us posted!

    Thread Starter michaelcaswell

    (@michaelcaswell)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    I heard back from Showit… they said “We block all xmlrpc across all of our servers. It is considered a significant security vulnerability, exposing your site to brute-force attacks and DDoS attempts due to its outdated design.”

    Plugin Contributor Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hey @michaelcaswell,

    Thanks for the follow-up. Your host may allow xmlrpc access only to Jetpack IPs – it’s something possible that some of our customers already do, and it seems ot be working fine connection wise 🙂 You may want to give it a try!

    Meanwhile, I changed the connection to an alternate endpoint, but we still see blocks at our end. This is the error:

    xr_-32710: parse error (local). not well formed

    <span style=”box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;”>I suspect the block isn’t 100% tied to the xmlrpc.php, but it lies within the server and can be addressed, and we still need our IP range to be fully placed in the allow list for your servers..</span>

    Would you mind reporting this to your host and see what they can do about it? It could also be a mod_sec block, but I am just assuming as I can’t see that from our end.

    We immensely appreciate our ‘bridge’ role between us and your host! Let us know how you get on ⭐️

    Thread Starter michaelcaswell

    (@michaelcaswell)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Ok, they said that they have added all the IPs to their allow list, and asked you to give it another try!

    Plugin Contributor Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    1 year, 3 months ago

    Hi there, @michaelcaswell,

    Unfortunately we still see that block at our end! 😭
    Is there any other way your host can check for the following?

    • any other security/caching plugins that may be enabled, and try temporarily disabling them to see if it fixes the problem.
    • search for any firewall on your server-side that might be blocking the communication with Jetpack – your host should be able to help you with that.
    • any mod_sec block or similar that might be in place

    As a last resort, if there is any chance to enabled the xmlrpc.php only for the Jetpack IPs (even temporarily) to see if we can connect the plugin, it’d be great.

    Let me know how it goes! Thanks again for bearing with us.

    Plugin Contributor Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    1 year, 2 months ago

    Hello @michaelcaswell,

    Do you have updates about that, do you still need help? We usually close inactive threads after one week of no movement, but we want to make sure we’re all set before marking it as solved. Thanks!

    Thread Starter michaelcaswell

    (@michaelcaswell)

    1 year, 2 months ago

    It’s still not resolved, but I’ve hit a dead-end with the hosting company… they’re not willing/able to make any changes to the server to accommodate the troubleshooting of the issue, and suggested that upgrading a more expensive non-multisite plan might (but not guaranteed) help, but I’m not inclined to do that at this time.

    Plugin Support Alin (a11n)

    (@alinclamba)

    1 year, 2 months ago

    Hi @michaelcaswell,

    Thanks for your patience while I looked into this. I tried to replicate the issue on a test site using the Secondary Title plugin and Jetpack Related Posts, but I wasn’t able to reproduce the same behavior. That suggests this might be specific to your setup—possibly something in the way your theme or hosting environment interacts with Jetpack.

    I know troubleshooting is tricky since your host has restrictions, but one option could be to test this on a separate WordPress install, even if it’s temporary, to see if the issue happens there too. If the problem only occurs on your site, then it’s likely something unique to your setup. If it happens elsewhere, we’ll have a stronger case to escalate this as a bug in Jetpack.

    I’d love to help in any way I can—let me know your thoughts!

    Best regards,
    Alin

    Plugin Contributor Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    1 year, 2 months ago

    Hey @michaelcaswell!

    This is another friendly reminder to let us know if you need further help from us, as otherwise the thread will be closed.

    Happy to assist you, so if you need, please reply to this message. Thanks!

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