[Plugin: Wysija Newsletters] SlowDown Issue had to deactivate plugin

Hi Arthur,

Yeah it’s possible that you’ve experienced some slow moments if you did update in the next 3-4 hours following the release yesterday. We’ve then patched the current version 2.1 so that this doesn’t happen anymore.
You can simply delete the current wysija-newsletters folder on your server and reinstall with the latest files. You shouldn’t experience any issue anymore.

Let me know,
Ben

We’re going to release a patched version 2.1.1 today for the few who may have suffered from those slow times.

It is resolved now. And will not happen again.
By the way in 2.1.2 we’ve changed a few thing to increase the speed on subscription forms. It used to be a bit buggy as well when cache plugins were activated. CSRF protection didn’t make any sense on actions accessible to visitors …
Anyway now the page load will be much faster !

Hi Ben

Are you aware that there has been a bug with Add Link to Facebook plugin by Marcel Bokhorst version 1.164

What happened last Friday, Saturday & Sunday, is somehow Wysija triggered about 3000 link posts over a 3 day period from last Friday till Sunday when i found the problem. I hadn’t sent out a Wysija Newsletter/mailing or anything else. It just began happening in the background with out asking permission or anything else before i new it i had thousands of links posted automatically through FB App.

I had to manually delete over 3000 links on the Facebook page for the site. These links were created i believe by a call from Wysija saying this short code [wysija_view]8[/wysija_view] in the expert part of the facbook links… check out i have left just a few on wall so you could see what i am talking about. https://www.facebook.com/BigMindOnline

All the links on facebook page had this strange shortcode, i think its a short code, in the excerpt on facebook links.

Currently i have Wysija disabled and i am concerned about re-enabling since it just started to spit out these links for 3 days without me being aware… it took days to clean up Facebook Page. I am also running Easy Digital Downloads by Pippin but i don’t believe this is the issue…. I believe what caused this was the interaction of Wysija and Add Link to Facebook plugin by Marcel Bokhorst version 1.164

Please help since i love your plugin but don’t want to have to erase thousands of links ever again… it really was a pain in the butt.

Thanks,
Arthur
https://ErichSchiffmann.com
[email protected]

Arthur,
You’re spot on, this is exactly the issue there was. I’ll explain what happened on our end.
In our last version of Wysija we added the View in your Browser link, with that we thought of giving a pretty url to each email’s browser version so we’ve created a a custom post type named wysija. And then on update we had a procedure to insert a custom post per email, it could be many depending on how often you were sending. The function we were using to achieve that is wp_insert_post, now we’ve realized that in that function can be hooked other plugin such as automatic post to facebook or twitter. This is something we were not aware in our testing environment we didn’t have any auto post to facebook plugin installed as in a testing environment you don’t really want to post to social network all the garbage you might create.

Anyway that’s not everything, this issue of crazy numbers was happening only on some server where the update procedure was failing and repeating itself(hence the humongous number of posts). This is an issue we’ve discovered few hours after the release on last friday. We’ve corrected it minutes after we’ve realised the importance of the issue.

Now our lesson is learned, and we will never use intensely a WordPress function which might be hooked with other plugins and which can potentially do all sort of things.

So rest assured Arthur, this will never happen again.

Though as I was pointing out to another one of our users, I think it would be good if this kind of auto post plugins by default were not posting automatically to all kind of custom posts unless authorised in its configuration. So this issue will not happen with wysija again that’s for sure but then nothing protects you from other plugins using the wp_insert_post function to insert hidden custom posts.

My apologies for all the time you might have spent cleaning your Facebook.

Now you can update safely to 2.1.2 ??
Cheers,
Ben