As I was afraid of. Looks like anyone that picks up the feed and grabs the <description> element is going to see those characters when they try to display/render the feed. Need to get rid of those characters in the excerpt content, guys.
@sevensoutbill – We have identified the cause for the characters appearing and have a new plugin version that’s going through our QA department right now. Could you send us an email at help@addthis.com so that I can send it to you?
Thanks,
Matt
Thanks, Matt. Email sent. I see a new version posted. I’ll give it a try.
Version 4.0.7 looks better. The characters are now gone from the excerpt in our category pages (front end) and RSS feeds.
However, the characters still appear in our category page source. I’m concerned that they will get picked up on search engines and show up in SERPs. We use Google Custom Search on our site, so they’ll show up on our site search results pages as well.
Thoughts?
I installed the version you sent me by email and tested on IE11 and Chrome. It looks like the characters no longer appear in excerpts on category pages or in RSS feeds. (I believe there were reports of the characters showing in IE11)
The characters remain in page source and I still have the same SEO concerns as above.
sevensoutbill – would you mind sending me a direct URL to an example page, so that we can investigate further? Feel free to email it to us at help@addthis.com if you’d prefer not to post it publicly.
Sorry Matt, all our testing has been done on a development environment, not publicly available. We don’t move anything to our live, production site, until it’s been fully tested. Is there something specific you’re looking for? I could send you screenshots, code samples, files, etc…
sevensoutbill – If you could email us screenshots and maybe even a HTML copy of an example page, that would help for our debugging.
Dear addthis_matt, hope it´s not too late, we have that problem with charcters ‘+-*’ and js stops with error in add-divs-to-coded-excerpts.js
Here you are:
Blog
Click on ‘Rezepte’.
Please let us now, how to solve. It does not concern to FF and Saf.
w/regards
Michael
Hi Michael,
Are you seeing the issue in a specific browser? I went to your blog using Chrome, but I didn’t notice the problem with the characters appearing.
Sry, yes, concerns to only IE, testet on 9, 10, 11.
w/regards
Michel
Morning,
shared on Facebook with Firefox (where the teaser is shown correctly) brings up the following:
Screenshot
w/regards
Michael
Even the facebook counter won´t count up on all posts I shared:
Blog:
Screenshot 1
and on FB:
Screenshot 2
@lengen1971 – Our developers are working on a more reliable way of adding the buttons to the excerpts and we plan on having a new version available soon. In the meantime, have you tried one of our older versions of the plugin, which used a different method of adding the buttons?
https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/addthis.4.0.4.zip
In regards to the characters showing up on shares to Facebook, do you have Open Graph tags on your pages? If you don’t, Facebook grabs a block of text from your page, rather than the og:description that’s specified within your Open Graph meta tags.
