Summer

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 will clarify why I think the problem is in powerpress, specifically that SQL query.

Powerpress didn’t generate this error in earlier versions, I don’t have an exact timeline, but I believe it first showed up on my sites with version 3.0.1 or 4.0

The error is EXACTLY the same every time. That one same query, 1000% of the time. Just that one. If it were a true issue with the mysql installation on the server, it would show up with other queries as well, not only just that single one every time, for possibly as long as two years now.

If I had seen other plugins with sql queries causing this error, then I would have started talking with the ISP or the owner of my dedicated servers long ago about digging into the mysql server and perhaps tuning it better. But nothing else on my servers or my sites is throwing this “mysql server has gone away” error. Not one single other plugin or WP installation. Not one that isn’t running powerpress.

Millions of queries a week across 3 different servers at two different hosts where my sites are installed, and the only time there’s a “mysql server has gone away” error is with the exact same query from the exact same plugin, only, every time?

I’ve been casually looking into this problem on and off for over a year, and everything points back to an issue in powerpress, simply because it’s only that one single query that’s generating this error, and none of the other sites on the same server that are not running powerpress ever throw this mysql error. Not ever. Not even other queries from powerpress generate this error.

Given that information, how can you unequivocally state that the problem is not in powerpress? Doesn’t it stand to reason that there’s something in that query that’s incorrect or somehow failing, and the mysql server times out because it cannot return a value? I don’t know SQL well enough to dig into why that query pops up and dies without getting a result, but the fact that it’s only that one query every single time indicates to me that there’s something faulty with that SQL query construction.

Okay, the social fields are working now with the add-on on several sites except one.

Maybe change the description on Github to be:

Co-Authors Plus add-on pack with profile fields for popular social media services PLUS the ability to allow attributing posts to their Authors when shared using Jetpack

to get rid of the implication that Jetpack is needed for all it’s functions to work?

Unfortunately that only works for people who have Jetpack installed.

If you don’t have or don’t want Jetpack installed, you need another solution.

This works just fine for full user accounts:
http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/quick-tip-add-extra-contact-methods-to-user-profiles/

But it doesn’t work for Guest Authors that are not linked to a user profile, nor for Guest Authors that have already been created.

That’s the situation we need a solution for. Help us, Jangda-wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope! 🙂

I didn’t add anything to functions.php; I hacked a mod into the plugin. I figured it was my only course of action with no responses after so long 🙂

In genesis-co-authors-plus/genesis-coauthors.php, look for the function jg_do_author_box, and you’ll see this line:

if( ! $author )
		return;

What I did was add this after that return:

if( $author->type != 'guest-author' )
		return;

Now I’m just waiting to see if there’s an update coming for Co-Authors Plus that will add the Google+ and Twitter author contact info to the guest author profiles when they aren’t linked to standard user profiles.

Yeah, there’s something still funky with Co-Authors Plus, and how it completely mangles the information associated with the user who has the lowest userid number.

For some reason FSB merely enhanced the kookiness.

Time to hack the database again…