• Resolved nosilver4u

    (@nosilver4u)


    I’ve recently discovered that Apocalypse Meow is somehow involved in an issue where plugin updates do not show up in the wp-admin for most of my sites hosted at WP Engine (all but one of them). If I disable A.M. and force a check for updates (and sometimes clear the cache), then updates will show up. Re-enable A.M. and the updates disappear.

    Is there anything in Apocalypse Meow that could interfere with plugin update checks or that hooks into that process at all? I kind of wonder if it’s connected to the stable tag (trunk) thing we discussed previously, but their support asked me to check with you on the issue.

    Thanks!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Author Blobfolio

    (@blobfolio)

    Hi @nosilver4u ,

    The “Anonymize User Agent” setting can cause issues with custom update systems that rely on the data WP normally leaks when making requests.

    Does disabling that make any difference? (WPE makes it hard to ever see realtime updates, but if you clear all their caches and hit reload a dozen times it should get there eventually.)

    That hasn’t historically affected updates host-wide, so I’m concerned there might be a conflict with FAIR or similar. If that’s the case, I’ll push an update to remove the feature entirely.

    Thread Starter nosilver4u

    (@nosilver4u)

    Aha, that’s the ticket! Interestingly, I have that option enabled pretty much everywhere except for one site. That was really throwing me for a loop as to how all my WPE sites were affected except for one!

    I rather like that feature, given recent events, so I hate to lose it. If you like, I can check with WPE to see if they can work around it?

    • This reply was modified 7 months ago by nosilver4u.
    Thread Starter nosilver4u

    (@nosilver4u)

    I chatted with WPE about the feature and what it does (in the core_anonymize_user_agent method). They’re looking into it, so I’ll let you know what happens.

    Plugin Author Blobfolio

    (@blobfolio)

    Thanks @nosilver4u !

    I don’t have any WPE-hosted sites to test, but from what I can tell, that feature isn’t causing host-wide issues anywhere else, and thankfully it doesn’t look like there are any conflicts with the FAIR plugin either. Every site I’ve looked at is displaying/fetching updates as usual, so that’s good.

    If the WPE devs need more details, all Meow is doing is using the http_request_args hook — at priority 500 — to make three changes to the “parsed args”:

    if (isset($parsed_args['user-agent'])) {
    $parsed_args['user-agent'] = 'WordPress/0';
    }

    if (isset($parsed_args['headers']['wp_install'])) {
    unset($parsed_args['headers']['wp_install']);
    }

    if (isset($parsed_args['headers']['wp_blog'])) {
    unset($parsed_args['headers']['wp_blog']);
    }

    Thread Starter nosilver4u

    (@nosilver4u)

    Well, I don’t know if WPE will actually get this “fixed”, but they did add the ability to change which mirror(s) we are using. We can either use wp.org with the anonymize option enabled, or use the WPE mirror with no anonymize. Not thrilled with that, but it’s better than nothing.

    Plugin Author Blobfolio

    (@blobfolio)

    Haha. Probably not at this point…

    I think what I’ll do is leave the feature but change the default status to off for new installations, and add a note about hosting providers potentially being weird about it.

    Thanks again for digging into the issue!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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