other_error – Data from STW was empty.

Hmm, that’s odd. Have you checked the errors by enabling the debug mode?

Also, check what your STW console says, as many of the “Data from STW was empty” errors have been due to an issue that gets reported in your STW account.

When I checked my account for that issue, I hadn’t locked associated my website with the permitted websites in the security settings on STW. You need to give your website permission in STW to prevent other people from using your access credentials.

See here:
https://support.shrinktheweb.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/7/1/how-do-i-lock-my-account–update-allowed-referrers

I really don’t understand any of that about credentials, etc. I am the only one using this on the site so no one else would be using it. I installed it like I’ve done other and it would work, so I disabled the feature to automatically import the thumbnails, created my own and uploaded them. But it would be nice if this worked.

It does work, I checked a few minutes ago.

Basically, the ShrinkTheWeb.com is not sending your website any data, but my plugin is trying to get the data. So basically there’s an issue with your ShrinkTheWeb.com account.

Have a chat with them to see if they can deduce the issue for you. However, setting this up correctly (https://support.shrinktheweb.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/7/1/how-do-i-lock-my-account–update-allowed-referrers) fixes the issue for 99% of people.

Dan

Although I am pretty keen at plugins and development – that link is like gibberish to me. All I did was create the account, added in the necessary codes as the instructions called for. I just tried again and it says Error Showing Thumbnail. So if there’s not a solution that can be written here to explain this, please let me know, I will disable, then delete and find another solution to my clients issue.

This is the requested URL – https://images.shrinktheweb.com/xino.php?stwaccesskeyid=4ef4e8f2a93b813&stwu=c7bea&stwsize=sm&Service=ShrinkWebUrlThumbnail&Action=Thumbnail&stwurl=https://mediacreationsgroup.com&filetype=.com.

Hello

There’s no need to be so aggressive. I’m just trying to help.

Plugin developers who offer free plugins are rarely appreciated, and usually give up their free time to help. I’m not getting paid to do this. This is just be trying to be helpful.

If you’re not happy talking to shrinktheweb.com to find the issue, then it would be worth you trying a different plugin.

Regards
Dan

@mymothersdaughter
Please do not share your credentials publicly, as it compromises the security of your account. You should change your secret key now that you’ve posted it for all to see.

Also, as Dan correctly suggested, you should at least open a support ticket to find out why your referrers are not being automatically added to your account. We have walk-throughs available on how to troubleshoot, using full logging, etc; but if you open a ticket, we will assist you further.

Here is the solution to this problem. Change the CURL request in the thumbnailer.inc.php file to:

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); // forces response into return string, not echo
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array("User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15") );
$remotedata = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

I had the same problem, but now it is working fine. It is important however that Dan Harrison will also update this in the next update of the plugin, otherwise you have to change it again.

Hi jvandemerwe

Thanks for the update. Not sure why you’ve added a Firefox UserAgent… Usually with 0 data coming back from STW, it indicates a problem with the STW account, such as overusage.

Dan

@jvandemerwe

It was most likely coincidence that your change “fixed” your issue. There is no reason to send a user agent. As Dan mentioned, the main cause is that the IP/domain is not properly added to the “Allowed Referrers” list. This is your account security and must be set properly.

By default, a bad request sets a timer for up to 6 hours. If you managed to fix your “Allowed Referrers” and waited some time; then it probably just resolved itself. You could also delete the cache file no_response.jpg to kick off the service again.

I have some additional information that might show that it is maybe not a coincident. When I submit the curl string in the browser directly it returns the full xml. But when I did a refresh of the thumbnail within the plugins admin it returned empty data.

@jvandemerwe

Actually, no, it is still a coincidence.

I just took a look at your ShrinkTheWeb account and it has been disabled. If you try to login, you will see:

Disabled: Unsubscribed from ConstantContact

We disable accounts that unsubscribe from outage notifications and newsletters, because it causes more headaches for our support team when people are not aware of changes.

The reason it works normally but not when refreshing is because you have cached images locally which will show all the time. When you try to refresh them, our system blocks you because of the reason above.

Open a ticket with our support team and they will get you back up and running again.

But that isn’t the account for the website I’m working on. Let’s not turn this in an investigation if I’m an honest citizen please. I wasn’t the only one with this problem. Now it’s working and my customer happy. It is not about that I want to show that someone was wrong. And @puravida1976, before assuming that my name corresponds with your researched one you could have asked me what account it concerned in this case. But as I said it works now, I almost regret that I posted the code.

@jvandemerwe
No need to take it so personally. I was just pointing out that the “fix” likely was coincidence. It wasn’t a far stretch to assume that the account in our system that matched your username here were one and the same.

Glad it’s all working for you now, but I want to ensure that your observations do not unintentionally mislead and frustrate others. It’s better to isolate any real “bugs” if there are any. In this case, I don’t see anything wrong with Dan’s code, so I was pointing that out.