Well, I agree that this problem being explicitly associated with RSS feed imported posts seems very unlikely. However, the only way that WP to Twitter would generally pop up with a 401 error is if one occurred, so it seems likely that its real. Is it doing this for every autoblogged post?
If you look at the errors logged on each post, you should be able to find out exactly when it started, which would be helpful.
Thread Starter
Summer
(@fpmsummer)
Looks like this has been happening longer than I thought. It was intermittent since about Sept 15-16, the became persistent around Sep 24, and every autoblogged post since then has that 401 error.
But when the site owner manually posts a couple articles, something he does once a week, those still go out just fine.
Each one that has a 401 error, when I tried to manually retweet, it gives me a 403 error, saying that similar Tweet had already been sent to the account.
Yet those articles were not Tweeted out.
On a whim, I downgraded back to WP to Twitter v2.7.3, the last version where things worked, and they aren’t working, so I’m stumped.
I’m having the site owner resend me all the Twitter app credentials for all the apps he has… maybe something got fouled up on Twitter’s end?
I find it difficult to imagine that this would be an issue with Twitter; that’s usually an all or nothing issue, and not so specifically tied to the method of posting.
Has anything else changed with the posting – the Tweet format, the number of posts sent at a time, etc.?
That’s very weird that you get the 403 error when manually Tweeting – that means that Twitter is, in fact, getting those Tweets. Which actually does point to a potential issue on the Twitter front – perhaps they’re implementing some form of spam filtering, and have flagged your autoblogged posts as spam. I’m not sure how they would do that, but I could imagine them doing it.
Thread Starter
Summer
(@fpmsummer)
Not sure exactly when or why it happened, but the access tokens for this app were indeed gone, completely blank as if he’d never set them. So we generated a new set of tokens, and poof, it seems to be working completely again.
Doesn’t explain why for two weeks items he manually posted worked, though… definitely up there on the “there’s no way this should have worked at all” scale.
That’s *weird* — definitely in the wtf category, as you say. But, glad it’s resolved, despite the lingering mystery.
