GrabPress filling my PHP Error logs with noise

Hi, getting the same in my log. I am now getting some posts that are automatically publishing with no title, content, etc. You can not delete them via wordpress dashboard, you have to repair via PHP Admin straight to SQL. I sent a support ticket today to Grab Media. I believe this is tied to the log we are seeing. Are you having similar issue with yours posting empty content? In my log I see Jetpack Jason API conflicting with Grab Press. Going to do some testing tonight and will post if I come up with anything useful or until our support folks help us out.

Haven’t seen anything in the logs about the JSON API from Jetpack, so not sure that is related to this other error message we are getting. I’m a bit removed from the content creation process for this website, so not sure if we’re getting the blank posts, but I assume I’d have heard about it if we were.

We upgraded to WordPress 3.9 today – same problem with the error messages in the logs, made no difference.

Hi, I removed jetpack all together and this cleared my log. JSON API was doing damage for me due to another plugin I count on. I usually do not use many plugins at all on my site. I will narrow down to 3 and the rest I code. This seems to thin out the log and errors.

Hi Zachary Brown, are you still having the same issue in your log? Curious? I am still getting “ghost” posts creating, which I now believe its due to a few autoposts I created with search criteria in the fields. I disabled any autoposts from Grabpress that contained search words. This did keep the log clear as well. I have tickets open with Grab, will keep you posted. But I wanted to share my findings with you. Thanks

Yep, still having the same issue. We use Jetpack and this Grabpress plugin pretty extensively and have both configured how we need for them to work how we want, so I haven’t made changes to any of the settings to see if that helps.

Noted, to share some helpful tip, I removed Jetpack all together (dont get me wrong its a great plugin but its a resource hog even on VPS setup, etc;), using WP Twitter Autopost, Shareaholic, BWS Captcha, Google XML sitemaps and Grabpress for all my plugin work. That being said, I notice if you need to edit and work in the WP Dashboard, head into Grabpress first and deactivate all the feeds you have (uncheck under active table). Make any changes throughout WP Dashboard, once your set, reactivate the feeds. This has helped tremendously with log and any conflict issues. Good luck and thanks for sharing.

Zachary Brown,

After taking a closer look at this, it seems GrabPress is logging messages through error_log(), which writes to the PHP error log. This is usually not a problem when systems have their log files set to archive automatically (by file size or by date), and it’s likely why this has never been an issue for us or for our users to date.

We did, however, determine that this deserves an improvement that is very simple for us to schedule for the upcoming version. We’re going to fix this such that only errors are logged by default, as it’s very obvious that GrabPress is logging simple functions (activity not related to errors) to the error log.

We appreciate your patience until we get this improvement released, and thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Thanks – I appreciate your attention to this issue. GrabPress is installed on a high traffic site with a couple of million pageviews per month and many authors, which may explain why I’m having this message triggered more often than other users. It is indeed writing to the error log and I do have logs rotating, but as it gets triggered so often, the log files balloon in size and make it difficult to find actual errors in between all the GrabPress messages. Anyways – it sounds like we are on the same page and I’m looking forward to the improvements in the upcoming release. Let me know if there’s any further information I could provide.

Thanks!

Zach

Zachary,

We found an interim solution for you, which should solve this issue until our next release (2.4.1) is available. We’re planning to release 2.4.1 within two weeks, but until then, you can try this:

Open this file in your plugin editor:
grabpress/src/class-grabpress.php
Line 46:
static $debug = true;

Change to:
static $debug = false;

Hope that helps for the time being.

Hi folks,

3 months ago, version 2.4.1 was an imminent release with a fix for this issue, but today 2.3.7 is still the version available on www.remarpro.com. As I’m using this on a fairly high profiles site and this bug has sat unresolved for months now (at least in the released version), this concerns me about the quality of this plugin and the timeliness of critical updates going forward.

Thanks,

Zach

Zach,

We were planning to release 2.4.1 a while back, but we’ve been waiting on WordPress.com to approve 2.4.0 before releasing 2.4.1, so we can keep the code base between the two the same, as opposed to having to manage two separate plugins/software apps. We’ve been on hold waiting for them to review and approve our plugin, and although we don’t have any open tickets to fix with them, it’s just waiting to be approved and released to WordPress.com VIP.

The solution above should be temporary fix for the issue, is it not?

We are hoping to release 2.4.1 next month, and I hope you’ll like the improvements made.

Ahhhh – thanks for the reply, that totally makes sense. I am very familiar with the WordPress VIP review time.

The temporary fix looks to be working fine. Just wanted to drop in here and make sure everyone was still aware that there’s folks out here still looking forward to a new version!

Thanks,

Zach

Hi Guys,
I applied the same temp fix, working for us as well. We look forward to the next release. So far all has been working fine. Several feeds are scheduled and we adjusted the times to be spread apart and not run at exactly the same time. We had an open ticket going with Dreamhost who also reached out to Grab to resolve the log issues, but now we know it will be addressed. Thanks for the support and great plugin.

Thanks newsthrottle. We finally got word today that the VIP review is coming to a close, and we’re waiting for them to release it. I’m cautiously optimistic about the timing of the release, but it’s certainly good news.

The fix for this will be included in the next release.