We have Discourse set to send comments to WordPress via webhook, using the Sync Comment Data option in the WordPress Discourse plug-in. That has, for the most part, worked fine. Recently, however, we’ve seen some situations where we’ll post an article in WordPress and the topic will be created in Discourse, but WordPress won’t display a link to create the first post. I’ve seen both nothing show up in that area, and “Comments aren’t available for this post.” Other times we’ll get the proper link, which in our case is “Join the discussion in the TidBITS Discourse forum,” but posts made in that topic won’t migrate back to WordPress. We are using CloudFlare, but I put it in dev mode so it wasn’t caching anything, changed some posts on Discourse, and saw no difference. So I turned CloudFlare back on. Next I turned off the Sync Comment Data checkbox and waited 10 minutes. That fixed things to a large extent—the posts that didn’t have the initial link to Discourse got them, and one post that had only the starting link brought in the posts associated with it. There was another article that knew it had two comments in WordPress, even though there were four in Discourse, and that didn’t update. I’ve fiddled with that topic in Discourse to see if that causes it to refresh. So it seems that the Sync Comment Data webhook just isn’t working reliably. However, when I go look at the webhook’s events page, everything claims to have posted successfully. I’m not too perturbed about a several-minute delay in syncing of comments from Discourse back to WordPress if the Sync Comment Data webhook can’t be relied on. But are there any other downsides to not using it? There was a comment about more API calls, but I don’t know if that’s a real problem or not. Or, is there some fix for the Sync Comment Data webhook that I should be looking into? Thanks!

Unless I’m wrong, the way the plugin is working is to listen any post event, and when it happens, it marks the concerned Wordpress Post to pull the latest comments from Discourse the next time the Post content is loaded. The immediate issue I could see is you might hit the rate limit for the current API user. Is the API user an admin? (it has generally less restrictions) It looks like you are using the normal rates limits. Here the current limits: Available settings for global rate limits and throttling You might need to increase those limits. Check User API rate limits or Admin API rate limits

[image] adamengst: But are there any other downsides to not using it? There was a comment about more API calls, but I don’t know if that’s a real problem or not. The biggest issue with not using the webhook is if you are displaying comment numbers for posts on an index page. Loading an index page that displays comment numbers can result in a lot of API calls to Discourse. With the webhook, this problem is completely eliminated. If you are not displaying comment numbers on your site, not using the webhook won’t result in many extra API calls to Discourse. I’m unsure about why the webhook isn’t working reliably for you. I’m tempted to think the problem is related to Cloudflare. Is there any pattern that you can see for when it works correctly and when it doesn’t?

Perhaps this is relevant, then. We are displaying comment numbers on articles and on the home page (so that might entail a LOT of API calls), and I’ve noticed in a few cases where the comment number is correct but fewer posts appear below the article. That’s still true here for instance, where the comment number is correctly reported as 4 but only two posts show: [image] The Lengths Thieves Will Go to Unlock iPhones - TidBITS Apple’s Activation Lock feature has helped discourage iPhone thefts by preventing an iPhone from being activated while it’s registered to an iCloud account, but thieves are finding clever ways to work around this requirement. Est. reading time: 1 minute Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to identify any pattern with when it has worked and when it hasn’t. We’ve been using CloudFlare the entire time, and most settings have been quite static during this time (we brought the site online in April 2018). I recently turned off CloudFlare’s Auto Minify JavaScript and Brotli compression to work around posts not refreshing quickly after editing, but I can’t see how that would be related. And I think the problem predates that change anyway.

[image] adamengst: I’ve noticed in a few cases where the comment number is correct but fewer posts appear below the article. The comment number may be different than the number of comments displayed on WordPress. Have a look at the plugin’s Commenting options tab to see if you have set any options that could prevent comments from being pulled to Discourse.

No, all my Commenting options are set to bring in everything—there are no exclusions by user level or the like. And most of the time, the comment number does match up. After I turned off the Sync Comment Data webhook in the WordPress plugin, that webhook over on Discourse showed a bunch of 404 error codes instead of 200 successful codes. Not unreasonable, I thought, but after you mentioned the problem with the API calls, I turned Sync Comment Data back on and redelivered a post in the thread I mentioned earlier that was out of sync. [image] The Lengths Thieves Will Go to Unlock iPhones - TidBITS Apple’s Activation Lock feature has helped discourage iPhone thefts by preventing an iPhone from being activated while it’s registered to an iCloud account, but thieves are finding clever ways to work around this requirement. Est. reading time: 1 minute It succeeded, and now when you look at it, it says five comments and displays five comments. So the basic communication for the webhook is working, just not reliably, and I can’t figure out any way to get it to do so, even with a manual trigger (this sort of redelivering didn’t work before with an event that had a 200 code to start).

[image] Arkshine: The immediate issue I could see is you might hit the rate limit for the current API user. Is the API user an admin? (it has generally less restrictions) It looks like you are using the normal rates limits. For our API key, it’s currently set up as All Users. Is that wrong? I don’t quite understand what behavior would generate an API request. Would the comment number that @simon was talking about below be counted? Or an article load? Our site is moderately busy—about 175,000 page views per month—but our Discourse install is relatively lightly used, I think, with about 700 posts per month.

I meant the Publishing Username you have provided in the options, whether it’s an admin or not. If a normal user and your forum busy (people comment a lot in a short time), then this could be the reason. I don’t know if it’s really that, but the way you’re saying it happens sometimes and it’s working after a few moment makes me think this is related. @simon I think it would be a good idea to alert by mail one time if it happens that a request failed with a ‘too many requests’ response.This would make the admin aware that the limit needs to be increased and clear any wild guessing.

[image] Arkshine: I meant the Publishing Username you have provided in the options, whether it’s an admin or not. Ah! So yes, the Publishing Username is an admin user, but the posts in Discourse that are created from WordPress posts are linked to the author of the article, and those people aren’t admins. But we’re still talking about 1-3 WordPress posts per day, and probably no more than 5-10 Discourse comments on those posts, so I wouldn’t think it would run afoul of rate limits.

[image] adamengst: so I wouldn’t think it would run afoul of rate limits. The webhook isn’t affected by rate limiting. I’d like to know why it is working intermittently though. If you find out any more about what’s going on, please let us know. I’ll keep my eye out for any similar reports.

I turned it back on yesterday and posted an article. The webhook claims it ran successfully: REQUEST [image] RESPONSE [image] But it didn’t make the link on the article: [image] I’m going to turn off Sync Comment Data again, at least temporarily, so this article can get linked to its comment thread in Discourse, which was created correctly. Clicking Redeliver didn’t make any difference. Oh, and for what it’s worth, I disabled CloudFlare for the talk.tidbits.com domain, so it should just be passing traffic through now. Other ideas about how to troubleshoot this welcome… Thanks!

Webhook connect to post comments to WordPress working unreliably

Product Support WordPress

simon April 8, 2019, 9:40pm 21

Thanks for letting us know. The problem that the old code was causing was fairly obvious once I realized how caching plugins override the WordPress Object Cache.

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Webhook connect to post comments to WordPress working unreliably

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