Mysterious PHP warning on author_text filling up logs

Hello, thanks for reading.

We’re a relatively high-traffic site, and our logs are getting filled up by a PHP warning from Co-Authors Plus that I can’t figure out.

The error:

Message
PHP Warning: Attempt to read property “user_login” on null in /srv/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/co-authors-plus/template-tags.php on line 129
Timestamp
2024-10-13T13:07:43.000Z
Kind
plugins
Name
co-authors-plus
File
/srv/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/co-authors-plus/template-tags.php
Line
129

It’s firing multiple times per minute, so I suspect it’s on every load of a page with an entry on it.

The relevant portion from that plugin file:

do {
    $author_text = '';

    if ( 'tag' === $type ) {
        $author_text = $tag( $tag_args );
    } elseif ( 'field' === $type && isset( $i->current_author->$tag ) ) {
        $author_text = $i->current_author->$tag;
    } elseif ( 'callback' === $type && is_callable( $tag ) ) {
        $author_text = $tag( $i->current_author );
    }

    // Fallback to user_login if we get something empty
    if ( empty( $author_text ) ) {
        $author_text = $i->current_author->user_login;
    }

I can’t figure out what we’re doing wrong here. I’m not clear on what author_text is supposed to do or why it’s null. I figure the error would only fire if the user is logged-out.

Maybe there’s some workaround if we manually set that value in our loop templates? I’d love any advice; this one has been confounding.

WordPress 6.6.2 (latest)
PHP 8.3
Custom theme based on understrap
Hosted on WP.com

• This topic was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by peterhassett.

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