Wordpress confuses authors/identities in small group blog owned by Mefi member...

May 21, 2007 11:44 AM

Our group blog (WordPress 2.1.1) confuses our IDs, and so sends email notifications to the wrong author. Also, this screws up loads of other stuff too.

Is this a known issue? Our blog [thejulyclub.com] has just 8 members, and very little commenting. Since day one, the blog thinks that certain members are posting, when in fact they aren't. They get email updates that they have posted new threads, when in fact it is usually me that has posted the thread. Any ideas what may cause this?

This is what I mean: screenshot

This shows that I have made only one post (I've made 32), and 'berry drabs' has made 21 (he's made 2). It shows that threehats has made 13 posts where he has made 6.

This doesn't seem to be an exact swap of ID's, just that somehow WP isn't filing them right. Any ideas?

I have googled, yahoo'd and [lord help me] posted in the ever-so-wonderful WP forums. So far, no dice.

Admittedly the email notifications are annoying, and a workaround might suffice, but I really just want it to work right.

posted by dash_slot- to computers & internet (10 comments total)

How are you guys posting? WP is not mixing up anything, the authors in the DB are exactly the ones showing up on that list. Apparently you've been assigning authorship via a category? Whom are you logged in as when you post?
posted by Firas at 12:04 PM on May 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

That's severely weird. There's no way that you're accidentally logging on as the wrong user, is there? Does it show the correct username when in the header when you're logged in to the posting interface?

I notice that the posts on the blog are being put into categories based on the author's name. Could this be a possible source of confusion?

I'd be happy to have a look at what's going on behind the scenes, if you trust me with your blog! I've done Wordpress troubleshooting before. Email's in the profile.
posted by chrismear at 12:10 PM on May 21, 2007

The default theme Kubrick does not easily allow multiple authors, so we post under categories - ie, we tag each post with our name under 'category': author, 'subcategory': name.

I log in as user 'johnnydee' - so most of the posts should be notified to me. But they aren't.
posted by dash_slot- at 12:11 PM on May 21, 2007

Email on it's way chris. As you may recall, I'm not the most techie of Mefi's user base...
posted by dash_slot- at 12:19 PM on May 21, 2007

Thanks chrismear for the swift analysis and then remedy. As a reward you are a lifetime member of thejulyclub.com (",)

Cheers again, and thanks for the interest to Firas also (where I said above "The default theme Kubrick does not easily allow multiple authors, so we post under categories", I meant to say - "The default theme Kubrick does not easily allow multiple authors to sign posts, so we post under categories"). Of course it allows multiple authors, I was misstating an earlier gripe I had about WP not automatically signing a post with the authors name.

Ta again.
posted by dash_slot- at 1:37 PM on May 21, 2007

Glad it worked out. What was the issue?
posted by Firas at 1:40 PM on May 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Something was wrong with dash_slot-'s user record in the database, so he just wasn't appearing in the 'Post Author' list on the 'Write Post' page. As a result, any posts he made (even though he was logged in correctly) ended up connected to a different user.

By visiting the 'edit user' page, and just clicking 'save changes', I forced it to re-write the user record to the database, and it all started working properly.
posted by chrismear at 2:56 PM on May 21, 2007

Glad to hear it's fixed!
posted by cbrody at 3:49 PM on May 21, 2007

Thanks for your interest - chrismear is the WordPress guru!
posted by dash_slot- at 1:14 AM on May 22, 2007

Impressive Mr Mear!
posted by Wilder at 9:29 AM on July 28, 2007