smashballoon

Hi @okapulsen,

I understand your frustration and am sincerely sorry that you experienced this situation with your Instagram account. I apologize if it felt like I didn’t follow up to help, that wasn’t because we wouldn’t like to help, it’s that the issue you’re describing is outside of our control as it relates to your Instagram account itself.

Instagram has strict requirements on the ability for apps to be able to publish to your Instagram account. If you refer to the Instagram documentation here, in the “Requirements” section you’ll see that in order to publish content it requires the “instagram_content_publish” permission. Our app does not have this permission and so it’s not possible for it to be used to publish to your Instagram account.

When you authorize our plugin, you are redirected to Instagram/Facebook where it lists all permissions which you are granting the app. None of these permissions allow access to post to your Instagram account or perform the actions you described. There’s not a way for our app to be used to post content or add followers to an account.

Our plugin has been through many ongoing reviews by the Instagram team itself and by independent security researchers to ensure the highest level of security, and we take security extremely seriously.

I’m really sorry that you had this issue and if there’s anything we can do to help then please just let me know.

John

Hi okapulsen,

I’m sorry to hear that happened to you, but I can assure you it is unrelated to using our plugin. What you are describing would not even be possible by our plugin and so I can assure you that the timing is coincidental, and that this didn’t happen as a direct result of using our plugin. We take security very seriously, and our plugin has been through multiple security reviews and even had a manual security penetration test by an independent firm.

Please be careful when making definitive statements like this as it questions the integrity of our products, which we take pride in ensuring are as secure as possible.

Many thanks!

John

Hi Isac @isacaraujo,

I’m so sorry for the issue here. I want to explain why this might have happened, and how you can hopefully make this situation less inconvenient.

This last year, Instagram required developers to comply with their new Data Protection Assessment, which has strict requirements on how long data can be stored for if it’s no longer being used. We changed our plugin so that if our app is deauthorized by the Instagram account holder, or if the page that the feed is on hasn’t been viewed in 21 days, then the data is automatically deleted. It sounds like this may have happened here, but obviously it’s pretty inconvenient for you that it did! It’s also the recent that the backup cache wasn’t used, as it would in normal circumstances.

In response to your feedback here, we will be adding a courtesy notice that alerts you 7 days before any data is deleted. That way you have time to act to prevent deletion.

Also, to make it easier for your client to provide authentication to the plugin, you can ask them to use the tool here, and then to send you their info so that you can manually connect their account. This doesn’t fix your current problem, but does make it easier for you to reconnect their feed for them.

I really apologize again about the issue here. We take all feedback from our users very seriously and will be improving the plugin as I mentioned above to reduce the chance of this happening again.

If you have any other feedback or comments at all then please just let us know, as we always appreciate it.

Many thanks,

John

We really appreciate that frgtech, and I really apologize again for the issue!

John

Hi @kenphotog,

I’m sorry to hear of your issue here but it sounds like there might be a misunderstanding as the Pro version is not required in order to change the settings you referenced. The free version includes full control over the number of images and columns in your feed, but the settings are in a different location now due to version 6 having brand new improved settings pages. Here’s a screenshot showing where these settings are now located, which is in All Feeds > Edit > Customize > Feed Layout.

I’m not sure how your layout automatically changed after updating, but I really apologize for the issue there! You can just go to those settings and change them back though to fix the issue.

Just to reassure you, we will never remove settings from the free version of the plugin which are already included, or force you to upgrade to the Pro version to access existing free settings. That definitely isn’t our style!

If you have any other issues or feedback at all then please just let me know as we love hearing from our users.

John

Hi @sebfck,

Looks like we released an update to fix this just 5 minutes after you posted this message ?? This setting was inadvertently changed in our recent v6 update, but can now be set to be 10 again. Could you update the plugin to the latest version and let me know if it shows up to 10 columns available now?

Many thanks!

John

Hey @mattthomas-photography,

This code itself doesn’t make a JavaScript request at all, it simply defines the path to the WordPress admin-ajax.php file so that when the plugin needs to get data from, or save data to, your database via ajax/JavaScript then it has the correct path to the file. The admin-ajax.php file is the standard way in WordPress of interacting with the database from the front end of your site. For example, when loading more posts into the feed using the “Load more” button. A JavaScript request is made to the admin ajax file to get new posts and cache them in the database.

Let me know if that helps at all, or if you have any further questions, and I hope you’re having a great day!

John

Yup that’s correct, the previous free version number was 2.9.10, and is now 6.0.

John

Hey @upclickdigital,

Sorry for any confusion here! As this is a major update which required updated documentation and info on our website, then we decided to bump the version number up to v6 to match our Pro version (which was previously v5), so that it wasn’t confusing when users are trying to navigate the docs on our site. This allows us to clearly state which info in our docs is for version 6 and which is for older versions.

Apologies again for any confusion as we skipped a few version numbers here!

John

Hi @petegeek,

I’m so sorry to hear of the issue here. We did unfortunately experience a bug in a recent update which caused the account connection to break for some users. We promptly fixed this in an update, but it did negatively affect some people. We really apologize about this, and have learned from the issue to further improve our QA testing process to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

If you have experienced other occasions of your account needing to be reconnected then unfortunately that is likely caused by Instagram/Facebook invalidating your access token, which they can do occasionally due to changes in your account, or other factors. Unfortunately, this is outside of our control and the same issue would occur with other plugins too. How often this happens varies from account to account though, as for the vast majority of our users they will never need to reconnect.

We do have ways to mitigate the effects of this though if it does happen. We have a backup cache which will display a backup version of your feed so it still appears on your website, we have an integration with the WordPress “Site Health” tool, and the plugin can also send out email notifications to let you know if you need to reconnect.

I apologize again for any inconvenience caused, and do appreciate you using the plugin and taking the time to leave us a review.

John

Thanks for your review and feedback @seattlegirl1971! Would it be possible for you to share which settings you’d like to see added to customize the appearance? We love hearing from our users on ways we can improve the plugin!

Thank you again for taking the time to leave a review, we really appreciate it and value your feedback.

John

Hi @yotamomer,

I’m sorry to hear that happened to you, but I can assure you it is unrelated to using our plugin. What you are describing would not even be possible by our plugin and so I can assure you that the timing is coincidental, and that this didn’t happen as a direct result of using our plugin. We take security very seriously, and our plugin has been through multiple security reviews and even had a manual security penetration test by an independent firm. There is also no way the plugin would be allowed to exist on www.remarpro.com if it did what you described.

Please be careful when making allegations like this as it questions our integrity as a company. We take pride in providing high quality plugins and being an ethical company.

John

Hi @androidbrick,

I’m really sorry to hear that. I want to assure you though that this issue isn’t related to our plugin. Our plugin has only been granted very limited read-only permissions on your Instagram account, and doesn’t have the required permissions to follow other accounts or take any other action at all.

I’m really sorry that this happened to you, but I can assure you that it is coincidental and not something caused by our plugin. The plugin has over 1 million active users and we’ve never had anything like this reported before.

John

Hey Mark @delayedinsanity,

Thanks for your feedback here. This is definitely a valid critique and we’ll change this in an upcoming update. This is something we added to the plugin years ago and no one had brought up before. We appreciate that this would be better suited to the plugin settings page though rather than the dashboard.

Thanks again for the feedback, we appreciate you using the plugin and taking the time to leave a review!

John

@webber2012 – this issue was verified as fixed in v4.0.1 on October 21st. If you’re seeing an issue in v4.1.1 then would you be able to provide more details? You can use the private form here if you’d prefer.

Many thanks,

John