WP Discourse is auto publishing old posts when performing bulk updates with the TaxoPress Plugin

Support WordPress
1

Hi! We are using the latest version, but any update (e.g. adding/removing tags) in older wordpress posts is flooding the Discourse topics (and spams our members) :confused: with years-old articles. I resorted to disabling the plugin when I need to update older posts in wp.

2

Hey Loukas, could you walk me through what you’re doing and what you’re seeing a bit more specifically. For example:

  1. I have “Auto Publish” and / or “Force Publish” enabled (?)
  2. I have not set “Force Publish Max Age” and / or “Exclude Posts By Tag” (?)
  3. I have posts that I have not published to Discourse.
  4. I apply a tag to an unpublished post. Or, I apply tag(s) in bulk to posts in Wordpress using some method (your post seems to imply this?)
  5. When I apply tag(s) the unpublished posts are published to Discourse.
3

Hello Angus,

  1. I have “Auto Publish” enabled, “Force Publish” disabled
  2. “Force Publish Max Age” is nonetheless set to 30
  3. There is a huge load of 14 years of previous posts that were not published in Discourse, as we did not have a “community” component back then.
  4. When I update posts individually, the older posts are not published over to Discourse. This happened indeed when I bulk updated posts by merging tags, using the TaxoPress plugin.
  5. When I changed (with TaxoPress) the tags connected to a large number of older WP posts, they started to be automatically posted over to Discourse.

Something similar happened a few months ago, when I did a mass update of a large number of older posts’ author.

Thank you!

4

Thanks for the clarification Loukas. I reviewed the relevant code, and there are possibly some tweaks we could make to the plugin, however given the multiple ways bulk updates can be made and the way auto publish is designed to be, well, automatic, there are some tradeoffs. Not necessarily tradeoffs in your case, but there may be in others.

Given that, I’d suggest the solution here is to just disable Auto Publish when you’re performing bulk operations. There’s no need to disable the entire plugin. If you’re finding that cumbersome for some reason, or someone else encounters this with TaxoPress, or some other bulk update method, circle back here and I’ll take another look.

5

Just to clarify: if Auto Publish is disabled, and a number of old posts get bulk-updated, they won’t get posted over to Discourse when Auto Publish is enabled again, right?

6

If you have both Force Publish and Auto Publish disabled, and you have no custom code hooking into the WP Discourse publication flow, then posts won’t get published unless you manually check the box in the composer menu.