jhmattern

I disabled caching, cleared it, and disabled all other plugins for testing and I still had the problem. It’s only when this plugin is activated, although it affects the default gravatars too; not just the local avatars. I also tried switching to the default theme briefly and I still had problems with the avatars.

The caching plugin I use is WP Fastest Cache. Caching is disabled for logged in users (like me), but the problem happened even when logged in (on my admin account and a subscriber-level test account).

At first I thought it might have been an issue specific to bbPress where I first noticed it, but it was also happening in the WP admin area in the comments list.

If it helps at all, it never happened until the most recent update (maybe the one before if they were close together and I just didn’t notice it immediately). I’m not sure exactly what changed there though.

It also only seems to happen when I use your plugin to upload a custom default avatar. If I remove that and leave the little guy with the hat, I don’t have this refresh problem at all.

Thanks! Sorry. Our posts overlapped. ?? I appreciate you looking it!

Okay. My main dev was able to take a look and figure it out. Here’s the solution for anyone else who wants to do the same.

Replace this:

$ts_fab_bio .= '</div><!-- /.ts-fab-header -->
			<div class="ts-fab-content">' . $author->user_description . '</div>

With:

$ts_fab_bio .= '</div><!-- /.ts-fab-header -->
			<div class="ts-fab-content">' . str_replace('href','rel="nofollow" href',$author->user_description) . '</div>

That’s in ts-fab-construct-tabs.php in the plugin includes folder.

Adding them manually when the links are added to a bio isn’t an option. We have thousands of member accounts, each with its own bio. And authors can change their bios on their own. So even if I add the nofollow attribute, there is nothing to stop them from removing it.

From everything I’ve found about this, it appears the only way to do it is to use a string replace wherever the bios are called to be displayed.

I’m able to figure out how to do this everywhere else in my WordPress installation other than your author bios. They’re being called differently, and I haven’t been able to figure out the right adjustments to the code.

This is incredibly important now, especially with the news this week of Google cracking down harder on guest posts done for links. Blog owners need the option to make these bio links nofollow by default.

Let me give you an example of how I did this on our author pages. Hopefully you’ll have an idea on how I can tweak it to work with your code.

Here’s what works on the author pages:

<?php
$the_author_description = get_the_author_meta('description');
$string = str_replace('href','rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href', $the_author_description);
echo $string;
?>

In your plugin files, I’m assuming what I need to change is somewhere in here in ts-fab-construct-tabs.php:

if( get_user_meta( $author->ID, 'ts_fab_position', true) ) {
				$ts_fab_bio .= '<div class="ts-fab-description"><span>' . get_user_meta( $author->ID, 'ts_fab_position', true) . '</span>';

				if( get_user_meta( $author->ID, 'ts_fab_company', true) ) {
					if( get_user_meta( $author->ID, 'ts_fab_company_url', true) ) {
						$ts_fab_bio .= ' ' . __( 'at', 'ts-fab' ) . ' <a href="' . esc_url( get_user_meta( $author->ID, 'ts_fab_company_url', true) ) . '" rel="nofollow">';
							$ts_fab_bio .= '<span>' . get_user_meta( $author->ID, 'ts_fab_company', true) . '</span>';
						$ts_fab_bio .= '</a>';
					} else {
						$ts_fab_bio .= ' ' . __( 'at', 'ts-fab' ) . ' <span>' . get_user_meta( $author->ID, 'ts_fab_company', true) . '</span>';
					}
				}

				$ts_fab_bio .= '</div>';
			}

			$ts_fab_bio .= '</div><!-- /.ts-fab-header -->
			<div class="ts-fab-content">' . $author->user_description . '</div>
		</div>
	</div>';

	return $ts_fab_bio;

}

I don’t mind having to add the plugin to my manual update list if there’s a way I can get this working. I love your plugin, but I need to find a way to make it work with the guest post policies or I have to go back to the default author bios. If you have any suggestions of where the string replace might work in here, please let us know. In the meantime I’ll tinker a bit more. If I figure it out, I’ll come back and post whatever I find in case anyone else is having this issue.

Thanks!

I already did that yesterday which is how I figured out it only happened with your plugin installed. When your added profile fields weren’t in there, everything worked fine. ??

Now that I at least have it working with one particular G+ profile format, I’ll just keep trying it that way. If the problem starts happening when I use that method too I’ll come back and let you know and hopefully we can pinpoint what the issue is. I just wanted to let you know in case anyone else was affected. ??

If anyone’s curious about making the change in the meantime, you can just edit simple-share-buttons-adder.php.

Change:

get_permalink ($post->ID)

To:

wp_get_shortlink ()

That’s what worked for me at least. Now it’s pulling my custom shorturls instead of the permalinks.

I’ll second this. I run custom shorturls for branding and sharing, and this is the first sharing plugin I’ve used where I couldn’t choose the short url instead of the full permalink. Anyone who tracks their shared links via something like bitly would need this option. It would be great if it could be added in the next release. ??

Seems okay on my end now too. Thanks! ??

I’m getting this error too at AllIndieWriters.com. My profile edit page where users can upload avatars is the BBPress frontend profile page.

Better still, is there some way I can stop caching in the BBPress forums completely? I suspect the caching is causing another problem as well, where the “freshness” data is wrong, as if it’s showing an old version of that data displayed as well.

handig, I don’t think that was the issue. I had trackbacks off on multiple blogs when trying to troubleshoot this. And I was getting hundreds of spam comments in my queue every day with this plugin installed. It didn’t matter if the blog had a few thousand posts, a few hundred, or a few dozen. Spam comments were in the hundreds regardless. And it all stopped the moment the plugin was deleted. It seems pretty clear that someone figured out a way to target users of this plugin.

I can’t explain why all sites using it weren’t hit. Perhaps the spammers are targeting only blogs with several factors — like the plugin being installed plus a certain Pagerank. Only my oldest, highest pagerank sites were being slammed (in different hosting accounts too, so it wasn’t an issue on my server letting them in). All sites hit were several years old and had a Pagerank of at least 3. That’s the only similarity other than the plugin that I could find. Newer and smaller blogs didn’t have the problem.

Even if it were an issue of trackbacks, spam wasn’t coming through on other blogs with trackbacks enabled. The plugin shouldn’t be doing anything that makes trackbacks more susceptible to spam. While I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, it really does need to be looked into, especially given how long people have been pointing out these problems.

No caching plugins being used. But the %20 solution worked. Thanks a lot! ??

I finally deleted GASP on my blogs, and the problem resolved immediately. So if there isn’t a problem with the plugin itself, then it does look like spammers found a way to target it and get past the spam filters. So for those getting slammed with hundreds of spam comments a day like I was, your only option seems to be deleting the plugin, at least temporarily.

I’m having a similar problem where it’s decreasing the font size of the first paragraph in each thread or reply because it’s stripping those paragraph tags. Any solutions?

I’m having the same issue. This was a problem with 3.6 before the last update. And when I upgraded to 3.7.1, the spam floodgates seemed to open again. I’m getting hundreds through, and almost nothing is being sent directly to the spam folder (and that’s where my GASP settings are telling suspicious emails to go).

This worked just fine with my previous plugin line-up. The only new plugin I’m using is a match captcha plugin, and that was put in after GASP started letting a ton of spam through to try to minimize the problem. I’ve since disabled the captcha for everything but the registration form as spam seems to have picked up there significantly too lately. Spam is getting through on multiple sites using this plugin — I’ve noticed it on at least three of my own, although I haven’t dug into the rest of them yet. All of their plugin line-ups are different, and I tested two sites with nothing else enabled, so it doesn’t appear to be a plugin conflict. All of those sites are on 3.7.1 now. I’m hesitant to update the rest of my installations.

On my main site as an example (although settings are different on each), the secret key is on, trackbacks are off, user refer check is on, it’s set to 3 maximum comments in moderation, and it’s set to send suspicious comments to spam (although it doesn’t appear to be doing that).

I also have CommentLuv enabled on that site if that matters in any way.