Having recent publicize issues with Facebook and Twitter

I just successfully upgraded to 8.1.1, and maybe that will resolve the publicize problem? I’ll do some tests today.

Or maybe I will eventually have to upgrade my website to https from plain old http?

Hi there,

In those cases, the link that does post with some text is https, whereas my site is just an http site.

Are you saying that Publicize actually posts a https link to Facebook? Can you point me to a specific post where this happened? If the post on your Facebook page still exists, can you give a link to that as well, please?

Checking your site in the Jetpack debugger, it does appear Jetpack things your site has https. Did you have https active on the site when you first connected Jetpack? It might work to disconnect and reconnect Jetpack.

However…

Or maybe I will eventually have to upgrade my website to https from plain old http?

Adding an SSL certificate to your site is really the recommended option. Not only does it protect both your, and visitors to your site’s privacy, Google and other big search engines also give a definite advantage to sites that are secured over https in search rankings.

And with services like Let’s Encrypt that offer SSL certificates for free, it doesn’t even have to cost you anything.

Hi KokkieH.

When it happens again (probably tonight), I will leave the posts up at Facebook and Twitter and alert you so you can see them. Over the past few weeks I have been deleting those as fast as possible and manually publishing, since readers who clicked those https links were getting a big warning about our site — because trying to reach an http site using https in front of the address causes browsers to issue a huge warning to not proceed to the site.

Our site, which has been around for close to a decade, has always been http. Not sure why Jetpack thinks it has https. We are considering an upgrade to https later in 2020.

When I manually post a link to Facebook and Twitter, it works perfectly. When I use JetPack Publicize, I’m getting the issue intermittently. My site posts about 5 or 6 articles a day, and I would say about a half or two-thirds have been encountering this issue over the past month.

Like I said, next time it happens, I will leave two or three of the https “failed redirects” up on our Facebook and Twitter site to allow you to see. Thanks!

I see you’ve published a new post around ten hours ago. Our logs for that post shows we sent a http link to Facebook and Twitter, and both the post and the tweet also show the http link and takes me back to your site. Is that what you see as well?

I also don’t see any links showing as https for your site in the Jetpack debugger any more either, so it might have been a temporary issue. But please let us know if it happens again.

Kokkie, yes, you’re correct, we’ve just gone through two successful publish cycles on back-to-back days without incident.

The only change I made was I disconnected publicize and then reconnected publicize. Our website only uses publicize for Facebook and Twitter, and it has worked perfectly for two straight days.

I will continue to monitor closely over next few days to see if this glitch has gone away for good.

Excellent. If disconnecting and reconnecting Publicize fixed it, the connection between us and those services were likely broken in some way.

I’m marking this thread as resolved, but please do let us know if this happens again.

OK the bug is back. After about 4 days of no problems, today the problem reappeared, where publicize seems to publicize our links as https instead of http.

I will leave the Twitter posts up for a few days so you can see them. Go to our site’s Twitter page and click on the top few posts.

When you attempt to click the links, you’ll see they try to go to an https site, whereas our site is http. This triggers a big browser warning.

So as for Facebook, I can’t leave those failed publicize posts up, as we have tons of Facebook traffic, and I can’t afford to have people seeing those terrible browser warnings that say “this connection is not private” and “this website may be impersonating” yada, yada, yada. So I delete those and just manually post our article links.

But here’s an example of one of the https links publicize posted to Facebook today: https://www.truenorthreports.com/citizen-protest-and-the-effect-on-vermont-lawmakers

If you click it, you’ll get a big warning, as that’s an https link and my site is an http site.

Hope that explains what took place today with JetPack Publicize.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by bruceparker1.

OK the bug is back. After about 4 days of no problems, today the problem reappeared, where publicize seems to publicize our links as https instead of http.

I will leave a couple of the Twitter posts up for a few days so you can see them. To see two examples click HERE and HERE.

If you look at our site’s Twitter page you will see that most posts are working correctly. But a couple posted on Friday are not.

When you attempt to click the bad links, you’ll see they try to go to an https site, whereas our site is http. This triggers a big browser warning.

As for Facebook, I can’t leave those failed publicize posts up, as we have tons of Facebook traffic and I can’t afford to have people seeing those scary browser warnings that say “this connection is not private” and “this website may be impersonating” yada, yada, yada. So I delete those and just manually post our article links.

But here’s an example of one of the https links that JetPack publicize posted to Facebook today: https://www.truenorthreports.com/citizen-protest-and-the-effect-on-vermont-lawmakers

If you click it, you’ll get a big warning, as that’s an https link and my site is an http site.

Hope that explains what took place today with JetPack Publicize.

Hmm, in the Jetpack debugger I still see only http links, and I checked our Publicize logs for all new posts on your site published in the past 24 hours, from “Years later, Deerfield Wind impact on bear habitat in question” back to “Video: House Judiciary Committee discusses police deadly use of force”, and for all of those it shows we sent a http link to Facebook and Twitter.

For some of them I do see the tweets containing https links, but even those our logs show we shared http links. So I’m not sure what’s going on here.

Did you try disconnecting and reconnecting Jetpack as I’d suggested in my first reply? I don’t see any recent Jetpack reconnections in our logs for your site

Here are the two incorrect https posts that posted on Friday that I kept up on Twitter and didn’t delete:

“Letter: Something to write Montpelier about”
“John de Bruin: Citizen protest and the effect on Vermont lawmakers”

I left them up on Twitter just so you could see them and check your logs against them, to see what’s going on. I deleted them off Facebook to prevent large numbers of people from clicking on them and getting the browser warning.

The other couple publicize posts that failed to post properly on Friday I deleted off Facebook. I can’t afford to have our readers getting all these warning messages.

By the way, it’s a consistent thing that if publicize posts a post incorrectly, it posts incorrectly on both our Twitter and our Facebook pages.

One interesting extra tidbit about the Facebook situation is that it fails to post the photo as well, whereas on Twitter the photo always posts correctly.

One last oddity here is that this has been intermittent. Some posts get publicized properly and others fail.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by bruceparker1.

Interesting, in both cases, the data we sent was:

<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.truenorthreports.com/letter-something-to-write-montpelier-about" />

and

<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.truenorthreports.com/citizen-protest-and-the-effect-on-vermont-lawmakers" />

So, we sent the HTTP version of the URL. I’m unsure where it’s being altered.

The next time that happens on Facebook, would you please leave that up? We can get a lot more info from Facebook’s end to track this down.

James (and Kokkie), you asked me to leave one of the https glitch posts up on our Facebook page, so I have done so on Sunday.

On Sunday, Feb. 2, our site posted 5 total WordPress articles and used JetPack Publicize for Facebook and Twitter, and only ONE of those 5 was a bad https link. That one bad https glitch post now appears on our Facebook page and reads as follows:

“By Mary Margaret Olohan Attorney General William Barr warned that religious people are not imposing their beliefs on others …”

Note that the link that appears beneath the text is https. Click on it to see what happens. Also, notice that on Facebook, when this https glitch happens, no photo gets posted. (Our site includes a featured image photo with every single posted article, by the way.)

For some reason, Twitter always shows the photo, even when it posts an https link. Facebook does not show our photo when it has this https glitch.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by bruceparker1.

Thanks for leaving that up.

I notice when clicking that link, the error message in Firefox (in the advanced view) indicates your site is using a self-signed certificate, and doing a scan in ssllabs.com shows me the same:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.truenorthreports.com

So it would appear that somewhere a (invalid) SSL cert is configured for your site, and that’s likely confusing Jetpack.

Please open WP-Admin ->Settings ->General, and make sure none of the URLs there show https. Also check your hosting control panel and make sure no URL for your site there uses https.

If you’re sure no URL anywhere in your site or hosting settings include https, then disconnect and reconnect Jetpack. Let us know if this again happens after trying that.

For good measure, please delete Jetpack entirely, then re-install and reconnect.

After doing that, please reconnect Publicize again as well to both Twitter and Facebook.

I talked with our hosting service GoDaddy, and they said the self-signed certificate is a placeholder for the fact that we *do not* presently have an SSL. Today they deleted the self-signed certificate from our account since it is just a placeholder default that gets issued with their service. They suggested that this could make a difference with plugins, but they don’t know for sure.

They said the ultimate solution to this is that our company should upgrade to SSL and have our site changed to https. I realize that’s true, and we are looking into that, possibly in the next couple months.

In the meantime, if this keeps happening, I am willing to delete and re-install JetPack as you are suggesting. But I need to know how this will affect our site. Will I lose our vitally important monthly JetPack statistics that we have from the past few years? Will I lose all the JetPack widgets we use? Will I lose other bells and whistles?

Do I need to backup my entire site first before deleting and re-installing JetPack?

Thanks for you input.