Nick Simson

I did the classic blogger thing and wrote up how I broke ActivityPub on my site and the steps I took to fix it, in case it helps anyone else out there.

Going to go ahead and mark this as resolved. With some help from my host I cleaned up a bunch of cron events and now the plugin is finally working as before.

@tnolte That’s very interesting. Now I’m tempted to delete some of these activitypub cron events, like the ones for posts older than when I set up ActivityPub, or all the activitypub_delete_actor_interactions

Do you think that would mess anything up?

@tnolte I installed the WP Crontrol plugin today and I can see 793 results for activitypub_delete_actor_interactions in my cron events.

In addition to the activitypub_send_activity events, I also see a lot of activitypub_send_update_activity events.

Now the changes I made in the staging environment were mainly converting a lot of WordPress categories to tags, and I am using the ActivityPub [ap_hashtags] shortcode to style my posts output.

Some of the newer posts are starting to appear in Mastodon, but it is like a two day delay or so.

@pfefferle I heard back from my hosting company’s support technician:

I checked on my end and it looks like the number of cron jobs is increasing again. At the moment there are 1246 cron jobs and most of them appear to be related to the activitypub_send_activity cron event. When I tried to execute them manually via CLI, the site ran into a timeout which I suspect is related to the high number of jobs.

Here’s an error my support technician highlighted, that kept popping up.

PHP message: Cron unschedule event error for hook: activitypub_send_activity, Error code: could_not_set, Error message: The cron event list could not be saved., Data: {"schedule":false,"args":[{"ID":1322,"post_author":"2","post_date":"2023-10-04 14:30:18","post_date_gmt":"2023-10-04 20:30:18","post_content":"<!-- wp:indieblocks\/bookmark {\"customTitle\":true,\"empty\":false} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-indieblocks-bookmark\"><div class=\"u-bookmark-of h-cite\"><p><i>Bookmarked <a class=\"u-url p-name\" href=\"https:\/\/www.remarpro.com\/plugins\/travelers-map\/\">Travelers' Map<\/a> by <span class=\"p-author\">Camille Verrier<\/span>.<\/i><\/p><\/div><div class=\"e-content\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Travelers' Map looks like a nifty <a href=\"https:\/\/www.remarpro.com\/plugins\/travelers-map\/\">WordPress plugin<\/a>. I've been interested in adding some location-based functionality to my site, mainly with my posts"

This particular post was from earlier in October, before I successfully got the plugin running on Flywheel hosting.

@pfefferle How would I add a post to Mastodon by hand from my blog?

After I set up ActivityPub successfully on my site, I noticed my site has a profile on Micro.blog (blogging platform connected to ActivityPub). The posts there seem to be federating, but I can’t find the latest in Mastodon for whatever reason.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Nick Simson.

@pfefferle So I don’t really know all the steps to set up a cron, but my hosting company did refer me to cron-job.org. I have that configured to run a cron event on my website at an hourly interval.

Like I said, I don’t know if I have it set up correctly. Do I need to have my host make some changes to a configuration file or the cron events themselves?

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Nick Simson.

I should also mention I’m using the NGINX config for Flywheel that Piper and Matthias figured out in October 2023.