cygnusstudiosflorida

Been to that page, nothing there that resolves the issue in the OP.

Thanks for all the advice, much appreciated.

Ah, upon further examination in the code editor, this seems to be a Jetpack plugin. I assume it’s a freebie included in the Gutenberg editor, since when you said “plugin” I thought you meant an add-on. I can’t use them as I’m not on a “business” plan.

That said, this is probably the best location for this post:
“Support » Plugin: Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth”

<!-- wp:jetpack/podcast-player {"url":"https://cygnusstudios.blog/category/podcast/feed/","selectedEpisodes":[],"itemsToShow":10} -->
<a class="wp-block-jetpack-podcast-player jetpack-podcast-player__direct-link" href="https://cygnusstudios.blog/category/podcast/feed/">https://cygnusstudios.blog/category/podcast/feed/</a>
<!-- /wp:jetpack/podcast-player -->

Hi Steven…

It’s not a plugin per se, it’s the podcast player block that’s built-in to the Gutenberg editor.

Is the forum you suggested intended for this player? If so, I’ll head over there and re-post this question.

Thanks!

Good catch. You’re certainly correct, that’s obviously not valid HTML, nor did I create it. I’ve never manually added any paragraph tags to this page.

It’s a good thing I “select all/copy/paste/save” the content of all of my posts and pages from the code editor in LibreOffice documents, as I did yesterday after manually fixing this issue.

Here’s what the section you referenced looked like in the code editor then, and still does:

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p><a href="#BADCO">Bad Company</a><br><a href="#RUSH">Rush</a><br><a href="#LZ">Led Zeppelin</a><br><a href="#TULL">Jethro Tull</a><br><a href="#STRYPER">Stryper</a><br><a href="#DIBA">Dio, Iommi, Butler, Appice</a><br><a href="#DG">David Gilmour (featuring Richard Wright)</a><br><a href="#DT">Dream Theater</a></p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

As you can see, there’s only one closing paragraph tag, and I also checked that there were no duplicates following it as well.

I then went back into the visual editor and miraculously all of the block errors that were being flagged yesterday had disappeared. So, as a test I again added some text then deleted it to force the “Update” button active, and saved the page.

After that, the TOC links were once again dead. Back into the code editor, unsurprisingly I saw that Gutenberg had stripped out all of the anchor tags within the document. Here’s one example of what is being removed (2nd line):

<!-- wp:heading {"level":3} -->
<a name="BADCO"></a>
<h3><span style="color:#0000ff;">Bad Company</span></h3>
<!-- /wp:heading -->

I re-added all of the anchor tags for a 2nd time, updated the page, and immediately backed out as I did earlier. The TOC then functioned normally again, and curiously upon examination of the page source at that point the duplicate closing paragraph tag had also disappeared.

After two attempts at adding these tags back, it’s apparent this problem is going to recur every time I edit and save the page.

I’d love to know why the block conversion process is removing these tags, without any warning whatsoever. It surely seems like a bug to me, as I can’t imagine WordPress interpreting internal anchors as malicious code.

The answer may be setting the page up using “Custom HTML” blocks when I get a chance, and when I do I’ll report back with the results. That’s the only other way I can think of to accomplish what I want, unless someone has a better idea.

Man, I surely wish I’d never converted this page to blocks… What a major PITA.