My Wordpress site was working fine but a plugin stopped working recently. The plugin is called ‘Photonics’ that loads photos from my ‘Google Photos’ account to my WordPress site. It does so by programmatically communicating with a PHP web request from infinityfree server to google services to verify my google id, secret, and an oauth2 refresh token. I contacted the plugin author regarding my issue. However, after trying every attempt to resolve the issue, I am not able to use the plugin. He has suggested me it could be hosting issue. Everything used to work a few days back, and now the plugin author suspects the problem may be in the WebHost end.
Could you please verify if there is anything that is hindering the functionality of the aforementioned wordpress plugin? I don’t know how it works but maybe the server admin could check the log files, and see if curl requests from the plugin is blocked, or if the server removes the refresh token? Or could it be a cloudfare issue?
The plugin author has suggested me to ask you the following:
I believe you can check with your host to see if they made any changes with respect to HTTPS calls happening via cURL from your site outwards (not from visitors to your site, but the other way round). Also check to see if they have any way to trace outbound requests made by your site. If they do, then see if any of those requests is going out to https://photoslibrary.googleapis.com/.
Yes, this is a server issue. Google changed their SSL settings recently which we know already broke access to the ReCAPTCHA API. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re running into the same issue now. This issue will be resolved next week with a PHP upgrade.
By ‘PHP upgrade’, do you mean the version upgrade from 7.3 (I am on this now) to 7.4 will be happening? Do you have specific ETA on the resolution? How will I be notified that this issue has been resolved?
iFastNet didn’t specify. It could be that they will replace PHP 7.3 with 7.4, or only upgrade to the latest security patch for PHP 7.3. But they did promise the SSL library will be updated, which will solve this issue.
As for a specific ETA, I don’t know. iFastNet didn’t provide any, and in my experience, they don’t work with very strict schedules.
I haven’t turned you a cold shoulder. But I don’t control the list of priorities for iFastNet. If it was up to me, this issue would have been fixed already. But it isn’t up to me, and it isn’t fixed yet.
Presumably one of the factors of consideration is that only a relatively small number of people have reported this issue. And if iFastNet has to weigh spending time on fixing something that bothers 100 users or something that bothers 100,000 users, it’s easy to see why they would pick the latter.
We haven’t forgotten about the issue. But no matter how annoying this is for you, we’re trying to build a service for a large number of users, and we’re not going to drop everything to fix one plugin on one website for one user, no matter how broken it is.
It’s not necessary for you to bump this topic every week. Just like it’s not necessary for me to respond to you every time to say that no, the issue is not fixed yet.
I still stand by my previous statement: I’ll make sure it’s announced when this issue is fixed. If nothing is announced, you can assume that it’s not fixed.
Calm down mate. Thanks for your elaborate response. I acknowledge everything you said minus few things. You don’t define what is necessary & what is not. I am not as you say “bumping the topic every week”. Considering your earlier over-confident statement that the issue will be fixed in the ballpark of a week, and considering over 2 weeks had gone and now a month, it was a simple two queries on that context. But, from now on I will consider your silence as a signal to pending resolution.
Yeah, that was misinformation I received from iFastNet. When I first asked, they said then. When I confronted them again a week later, it turned out the issue had ended up somewhere lower down on the backlog.
I’m sorry for misinforming you about that, but please understand that I’m also dependent on iFastNet for this.
I personally like giving at least some estimate as to when an issue will be fixed, but iFastNet does not have a tendency of having strict deadlines and following those deadlines.
Dear Admin, Its okay. I truly appreciate your hard work in keeping many of us updated and in trying to help us to the best of possibilities despite certain limitations. I respect your helpful effort & perseverance. I shall sustain my patience, & again am very grateful to you. God bless.