PHP 7.1 Bug – Warning: Illegal string offset…class-social-popup.php

So after updating to php 7.1 I started getting these warnings

Warning: Illegal string offset ‘facebook’ in /var/www/fr/actifio/wp-content/plugins/popups/public/class-social-popup.php on line 465

Warning: Illegal string offset ‘twitter’ in /var/www/fr/actifio/wp-content/plugins/popups/public/class-social-popup.php on line 473

Warning: Illegal string offset ‘google’ in /var/www/fr/actifio/wp-content/plugins/popups/public/class-social-popup.php on line 481

dug around a bit and it looks like on line 451 spuvar_social is declared as a string and then a couple lines down we try to add elements to it as an array

$spuvar_social = '';

so I changed

$spuvar_social = '';
// to
$spuvar_social = array();

and the warnings went away. hopefully a fix can be added to the next version.

Thanks!