Some stories do not load for non-admin users

Hi @openthebible thanks for opening the support topic and for sharing your Site Health Information. Can you please share the information below:

1. Do the users affected all have the same user role or is this for multiple types of user role that are not admin?
2. Do the users see any console errors when experiencing the “unable to load” message?
3. I can see that you have the Health Check and Troubleshooting plugin installed on your site. Can I check if you have run through the steps here?

@adamdunnage

1. We only have one role for Web Story creators. But I believe it would be the same thing for all non-admins.
2. Will check.
3. As I said, this is not happening for admin users. Also, your plugin is full of bugs, it has nothing to do with our other plugins or theme. It has started out of nowhere.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.

@openthebible

1. We only have one role for Web Story creators. But I believe it would be the same thing for all non-admins.

if you could confirm that then that would be great.

2. Will check.

Thanks a lot!

3. As I said, this is not happening for admin users. Also, your plugin is full of bugs, it has nothing to do with our other plugins or theme. It has started out of nowhere.

I appreciate your frustration here and we are not placing the blame elsewhere but we have seen issues similar to this in the past related to conflicts so it’s always best to rule this out first. In this case you could try to temporarily manually disable plugins one by one to see if the other users experience anything different.

Do the users experiencing this have a custom user role? I can see that you have the User Role Editor plugin installed. It may be that if the users have a custom user role that some expected permissions have not been granted for the Web Stories plugin.

@adamdunnage

The user role editor is working fine, we only have bugs with your plugin. We have given all web story-related roles to our workers.

Doubt that there are any plugin conflicts since we have very few and have tried disabling some of them.

This is the console screenshot: https://i.talpix.lt/1HZyY.png

Thanks

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.

@openthebible Thanks for sharing the added information. Can I just confirm with you that if you go to Users > User Role Editor, select the user role associated with this issue and check the Custom capabilities section, are all of the Web Stories options selected?

@adamdunnage Yeah, have checked this multiple times in the past. Since this is the second time your plugin does something odd for non-admin users. The first issue was that they couldn’t see the font dropdown list (it hasn’t been fixed yet).

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.

@openthebible If possible could you please go to this link which will create a disposable WordPress site for you. With this could you install the Stories plugin and add a couple of other users to the site.

Once this is done could you try following the same process to see if you experience the same outcome? In the meantime I will continue to run some checks on my side.

@adamdunnage Hi, everything seems to be fine on this test version. That doesn’t really tell me anything, since bugs normally need some additional factors.

@openthebible Thank you for confirming. This would suggest that this is indeed a conflict with another plugin which we can continue to troubleshoot for, a host configuration which would need to be addressed with your host, or the user role not having the correct permissions.

I don’t believe you confirmed above if the users experiencing this had custom user roles or built in WordPress user roles. Could you please confirm this?

I am continuing to test this on my side to see if I can find the cause. Once I have an update I can provide it here. Thanks for your continued efforts with this.

@adamdunnage Our editors seem to also have these issues. The Editor role is a default one in WordPress. So it doesn’t seem to make a difference if it is a custom or a default role.

If you need any information from our side – let me know, thanks.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.

I just talked to another website owner who is using your plugin for a similar niche website. He told me that your plugin is very buggy and is using a lot of resources.

So fix your bugs, instead of telling people that it is something to do with their hosting/theme/plugins, when it is your own plugin that doesn’t work properly.

Don’t want to sound harsh, but that’s the reality.

Hi there @openthebible!

I’m the lead on support for the Web Stories plugin. I wanted to jump in here as I see that you’ve posted several topics as well as replied to and posted your own review of the Web Stories plugin recently.

As my colleague Adam noted, we take bug reports and quality issues with the Web Stories plugin very seriously. Web Stories, like all plugins, does have bugs – sometimes more often than we’d like. We thoroughly research all bug reports in order to try to replicate the issue, understand its root cause, and ultimately determine if it’s something that needs to be addressed in the Web Stories plugin.

In the case of the issues that you are experiencing, based on the info that you’ve provided including your Site Health (thank you for that) as well as our research and troubleshooting work to date, we cannot identify one or more root causes for these issues that are *exclusively* within the Web Stories plugin.

Typically, this indicates that something in Web Stories is conflicting with something else in your setup. There could be something that we can or should address in Web Stories to make it work more effectively with a particular host or theme, but there aren’t fixes that we can make in Web Stories in isolation that will address the problems that you’re experiencing. The massiveness of the WP ecosystem is a blessing and a curse this way – you gets lots of options, but the more options you have, the greater the probability for conflicts and problems.

I know that this is really frustrating, and we’re certainly not trying to say that Web Stories is perfect or lay blame on any other plugin or other software. This is unfortunately the reality of WordPress plugins.

We of course want to help find the causes of the issues that you’ve been experiencing so that we can recommend next steps and you can use Web Stories effectively. Adam will continue to work with you on troubleshooting here and will follow up soon with next steps. Because your reported issues have been related to user roles, I know we’ve been focused on troubleshooting related to that, but this could also be due to conflicts between your user role plugin and Web Stories and your hosting setup and/or another plugin or your theme, so we’ll need to dig deeper there.

Bethany

@openthebible Thanks once more for your patience with this. I am so far unable to replicate this on any of our sites. If possible would you be able to share with us a recording of this happening so we can see this in action? You can use a service such as Loom to do this and share here.

Is the loading issue happening for all users with those user roles or just some of them?

If you do have the time as well and it is possible on your side, you could try setting up another a fresh WordPress install on the same hosting provider with just the Stories plugin active and test this like you did with the disposable site. That could help narrow things down.

I will continue to test on my side in the meantime to find the cause for you. If I have any updates in the meantime I will pass them on to you here.

@adamdunnage

Hi Adam, this is happening for all non-Admin users.

I doubt this has anything to do with our hosting since everything was fine a few days ago and we use a reputable and expensive hosting with an up to date PHP version (can provide short-term login details over email to our FTP if needed).

This is a recording of the Story Loading and Font Selection issues: https://linksharing.samsungcloud.com/dzfoMdplycif

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by openthebible.

@openthebible Thank you for the added information and for the recording that’s helpful for us to see. Looking back through everything I can see that you are receiving a 414 console error.

This error could be linked to these issues. The 414 error typically means the requested URL is too long. This is unusual because the requested URL here doesn’t look to be too long, and typically servers handle much longer URLs.

This leads me to believe that there is a potential server misconfiguration issue here. I would recommend reaching out to your hosting provider with this information and provide the same screenshot and ask them to check if there is a limit in place here and if it can be extended or if there is some form of misconfiguration that can be addressed.

Please do let me know how this goes and if nothing comes of it I will be happy to continue to troubleshoot the issue with you.