Error message causing invalid desktop landing page

Hi @vinitabansal to helps us get started with proving support, please enable the Remote Diagnostics option found in the Mailchimp for Woocommerce plugin settings tab. This way we’ll be able to take a look at your logs and other store information for zeroing in on what may be occuring here. Once you’ve enabled it please reply back in this thread to let us know.

We’ll keep an eye out for your response.

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for your reply. I have enabled the remote option. Kindly check.

Please note that I have hit the url that was causing problem and giving error. I noticed that it gives an error the first time with the message “You’re not allowed to do this” and if I refresh, the page loads just fine.

Thanks,

Vinita

Hi @vinitabansal, thank you for enabling the remote diagnostics. At first glance, there’s nothing that’s jumping out as an issue with what we reviewed. However, you do have a fair number of plugins active and it seems like this might be a conflict somewhere. Here are some steps to test this theory:

1. Verify that you are using the latest version of the Mailchimp for WooCommerce plugin.
2. Switch to the default WooCommerce theme.
3. Deactivate all plugins except for WooCommerce and Mailchimp for WooCommerce.
4. Test the scenario again, preferably in a staging environment.

If the issue is resolved after following these steps, it indicates that there may be a conflict with one of the themes or plugins that were deactivated. You can then reactivate each theme or plugin one by one and test the scenario after each activation to identify the conflicting theme or plugin.

Appreciate your response Khungate. The approach to activate/deactivate plugin is bruteforce and very time consuming.

Since the issue is happening with only 1 product out of 16 products I have in my store, I want to explore other ways to solve this problem.

Can you please help me understand when is this error message thrown by the plugin? It might help me identify the root cause of the issue. I am a dev myself. So, you can share technical details. Look forward to your response.

Thanks,

Vinita

@vinitabansal this is very interesting because the only time our plugin should be doing this is if you were in your admin trying to make a specific AJAX request, and it’s making sure you have the right permissions to do something. Do you replicate this every time you’re hitting the pages or is it just “sometimes”? Are you logged in as an admin?

Can you confirm that you get this error message just navigating through your site as customers do? I of course didn’t get an error while hitting that exact URL you specified with the query params… but we would love to get to the bottom of it because that just doesn’t make sense as to how that function would even be triggered at all while visiting a product page.

@ryanhungate, here are my observations:

1. The issue doesn’t happen when I am logged in as an admin.
2. It occurs every time on the first hit when tried in incognito mode. Page loads fine when refreshed.

Customers don’t hit the url with parameters. So, it works for them.

I need the url with parameters to work fine for syncing my products to Google Merchant Center.

Thanks,

Vinita

@vinitabansal thanks for the info. I was actually able to see it one time as well using that method. This makes me wonder if you have anything else going on under the hood that might be either 1. triggering an admin hook to fire by accident… or 2. possibly this error message could be coming from another location ( plugin or function ).

You did mention you are a developer previously so I would like to offer up a quick solution to help debug this problem on your site. If you could go into the class-mailchimp-woocommerce-admin.php file at the very bottom there is a function called adminOnlyMiddleware and I would like to edit this function to provide a little context on the reason it’s firing.

If you simply replace this whole function with this below:

/**
 * @param string $message
 * @return bool
 */
protected function adminOnlyMiddleware( $message = "You're not allowed to do this" ) {
    if ( ! current_user_can( mailchimp_get_allowed_capability() ) ) {
        $error = new \Exception();
        mailchimp_debug('admin', 'tracing admin json error', $error->getTrace());
        wp_send_json_error( array( 'message' => $message, 'from' => 'mailchimp-for-woocommerce' ) );
    }
    return true;
}

And then enable the “debug” mode on your plugin logs, you will see a new log being saved that might help us understand why it’s happening. If you need any other help with this please let me know – but I think this is a good start to understand how to take this a step further. I also added a “from” property to the JSON being returned to be 100% sure that it’s coming from our plugin here while looking at the front end response.

Sorry there’s not a better way to do this, but we’ll work it out ??

Thanks @ryanhungate. I’ll do these changes probably next week and report back.

I will also search inside other plugin’s codebases to see if this message shows up in any of the files.

Thanks for your support so far.

No problem @vinitabansal, please let us know if you have any additional findings, we’ll be happy to help troubleshoot further if necessary.

@khungate, I haven’t been able to make those changes yet. I’ll do them and update this thread with my findings.

Hi @vinitabansal, we’re going to close out this ticket for now since it’s been a few weeks since we’ve been in touch.

Please let us know if you still need any help and we’ll be glad to reopen and troubleshoot further. Please note, that the best way to reach us is over at the GitHub plugin page: https://github.com/mailchimp/mc-woocommerce/. From there, you can receive direct responses from the development team, log new issues, download the latest version, and track existing support tickets.