Hey folks. Just wanted to chime in here since this thread came to my attention during our weekly pass of the dot-org forums here. Though I know morespinach has since moved on to another plugin, I wanted to follow-up with you all to thank you for the heads up here – and more importantly to apologize for the inconvenience you’ve faced so far.
One thing that’s important to note, and which often gets lost in the shuffle when discussing 404s, is that there is rarely a one-size-fits-all solution for these problems. There are a few reasons you’d be experiencing 404 errors on the frontend of your site…and even though the end result (landing on a 404 page instead of your correct destination) may appear to be stemming from the same problem at face value, in reality there are a number of potential causes under the hood. I’ve spent a good chunk of time the past couple days reviewing this with the team and we’ve found that 404 issues generally fall into one of two buckets:
1) a change of events/event slugs without a permalink refresh
2) a new plugin coming online and registering new rewrite rules which effectively ‘short circuit’ our own
To further complicate matters: caching definitely is an issue too, in that it masks what is really happening. For example, if one of the above problems is in play but is then resolved, we might still have a cached 404 page being served for a valid page. We’re exploring possible ways you can help identify these more easily, since we can see how the current setup might lead to confusion – and would also lead to situations where the problem might persist even after the deactivation route has been taken. (For example, one approach we’re considering is building a snippet that fires when a 404 takes place, checks if the request includes an events/event slug, then capturing the matching rule and the full set of rules in place at that point. That might give us useful info we can turn around and either identify a problem in how we are interacting with that bit of WP or else let us say, ‘Hey look – plugin XYZ is behind this and they’ve gone about this the wrong way.’). If we can find a solid approach there we’ll offer it up.
In the interim, we’ll try and be as clear about how to troubleshoot 404 issues as we can – to the extent you can help us drill down to identify the scope of these (via troubleshooting requests from our support team etc), it’d be most appreciated. Thanks for your feedback and patience so far.
