Oh boy. So I knew that LivePress had been broken for a long time; works for some, doesn’t work for others. Not exactly consistent. I get thank you’s as well as fuck you’s for my work on this plugin (well not really fu’s but…). I believe it broke sometime around the 2.8 release of WordPress but I can’t be sure. I was getting tired of the complaints (and the manufactured fu’s in my head), so I decided to start working on it last night. The goal was to find out why it was failing. I’m trying to stop thinking in grandiose terms and then ending up not doing anything. ( Like wanting to rewrite the entire plugin from scratch and then abandoning it for a year.)
Anyway, at first I thought IXR-class.php was the problem because it had caused issues in the past, and while trying an older version of this file the plugin started working for about 3.2 seconds. But then I couldn’t make it work again no matter what version of the file I tried. I was beginning to think I had been hallucinating. But no matter; I decided to abandon that lead, follow another and finally tracked it to the simplest thing ever.
The plugin was connecting to livejournal’s xmlrpc interface but not getting the response it was expecting – which is 200 OK. After that point, it would go kaput. That explains how it was breaking but what unexpected response was it getting, and why? I tried to connect manually from my VPS account and the answer slapped me in the face like a wet fish:
digsite: > telnet livejournal.com 80
Trying 208.93.0.128…
Connected to livejournal.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
POST /interface/xmlrpc HTTP/1.0HTTP/1.0 403 Denied
Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:13:13 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: ljuniq=FZwSUdeXCkSXkh1:1267956793:pgstats0:m0; expires=Thursday, 06-May-2010 10:13:13 GMT; domain=.livejournal.com; path=/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html<h1>Access Forbidden</h1>You’ve been temporarily banned from accessing LiveJournal, perhaps because you were hitting the site too quickly. Please make sure that you’re following our <a href=’http://www.livejournal.com/bots/’>Bot Policy</a>. If you have questions, contact us at webmaster@livejournal.com with the following information: FdeXCkZwSUSXkh1 @ —.—.—.—Connection closed by foreign host.
digsite@littledeath: >
Yep, banned. I knew the code connected to LJ far more often than it needed to, but I wasn’t sure why and figured since it was still working that I could ignore that fact for a while – that was a couple years ago. The code wasn’t my creation, afterall. I sortof adopted it and all its clunkinesses.
The limit is 5 connections per second. The site get scrawled by search engine bots all the time and with the plugin connecting to LJ with every single insignificant page load, I can see that exceding the limit 100-fold. I have already edited the code and it connects only when it absolutely needs to – like during a post or edit. I asked LJ to remove the ban on my IP early, explaining the situation. Now I wait to see if my own site gets un-banned by LJ in the near future so that I can verify it is fixed. Fingers crossed.
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