WordPress post not found on mastodon

  • Resolved Mark W

    (@mrakw)


    5 months ago

    I have been using the activity pub plugin for a couple months and it worked fine with our first 10 posts. Today, however, we published a post and it didn’t appear on the mastodon feed. I looked though the logs in /var/log/apache2/error.log, but didn’t find anything related to activity pub. I then made a minor edit to the post, hoping that it would get “republished”, but that didn’t work.

    So my question is two-fold:

    First, how can I debug this?

    And second, is there a way to republish the post so that it appears on Mastodon?

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

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Author Matthias Pfefferle

    (@pfefferle)

    5 months ago

    Hey @mrakw 👋

    I could find your latest post on Mastodon, so it seems to be no general issue. Can you check if the WP-Cron is properly working (no blocking item or too many items that slow down the process). Have you maybe made changes to the WP-Cron system?

    Can you check your followers list, if the Mastodon Account, you use to check new posts, is still listed there?

    Thread Starter Mark W

    (@mrakw)

    4 months, 4 weeks ago

    Can you confirm that you can see the post from Jan 5? My account is following the blog, and I can see the account in the WP activity pub follow list. However, in the WP activitypub followers list, it says that almost all of the followers were “last updated” on January 4, which is a day before the last post.

    Also, how is it that you are seeing that the post is accessible? If there is some way to do this from the command line, I’d like to know!

    (I will look into the cron later, but nothing has changed, the instance is rather simple).

    Plugin Author Matthias Pfefferle

    (@pfefferle)

    4 months, 4 weeks ago

    The easiest way is to simply put the URL of your post into the search field of Mastodon. If it shows up in the search results, it is not an issue of the formatting, but with the distribution.

    Thread Starter Mark W

    (@mrakw)

    4 months, 4 weeks ago

    After a 48h wait, both recent posts magically appeared on Mastodon. I have no idea why there was a delay. I checked the crons and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. One cron job (apt-cron) was complaining about not being able to update a package, but that was it.

    I suspect that the problem probably is cron related, but I don’t know how to debug this. Is there a specific cron job used by activity pub? And does it save any logs?

    Plugin Author Matthias Pfefferle

    (@pfefferle)

    4 months, 4 weeks ago

    The posts will be sent using WP_Cron. If the cron is configured, to only run once a day, the posts will be published on that time of the day. Have you maybe set WP_DISABLE_CRON ?

    Thread Starter Mark W

    (@mrakw)

    4 months, 4 weeks ago

    Thanks! It turns out that WP_DISABLE_CRON was set to true. Some digging says that when this is the case, you need to run wp-cron.php manually, such as from cron. I added this to crontab and it seems to work

    15 * * * * php /var/www/wordpress/wp-cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

    Plugin Author Matthias Pfefferle

    (@pfefferle)

    4 months, 4 weeks ago

    Perfect 🙂

    I recommend use both, a manual cron via crontab and to not set WP_DISABLE_CRON , but having a crontab only is fine too. I will resolve this issue for now, feel free to unresolve it or create a new one if you still have issues.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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