Something bizarre happened yesterday. In general, I write my substantive posts from WordPress, and they post to Steemit via the Steempress plugin. For some reason, my 50-word short story posted to Steemit five times. I then had to scramble to change all of the repeat posts to new content.
Will it happen again? I’d like to find out.
I have two theories as to why this happened:
- WordPress erroneously published to Steemit when I clicked Preview.
- Or it published to Steemit when I clicked Save Draft.
Well, I suppose there are other possibilities. Theory #3 is that it was some kind of momentary glitch. WordPress underwent some fairly massive changes recently (highly regrettable ones, in my opinion), and maybe this was the fallout. If so, hopefully it is fixed.
All of this happened while I was at an event yesterday. I wrote the post, clicked Publish, and didn’t check back into my blog for hours. When I returned, I learned that my post had gone up 5 times. Weirdly, one version was an early one, before I had even added a title.
Of course, theory #4 is that it was simply user error. But I don’t think so. I don’t actually have the ability to publish from WordPress multiple times, as far as I know. Once you click “Publish” in WordPress, that button goes away and the “Update” button appears. So I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me.
If you are entertained by this journey, happy to have you along. (Apologies to anyone who auto-upvotes my posts.) Perhaps the test process will reveal a bug of some kind. Here goes.
The test process
Here are the steps I’m taking to test each of the theories:
- I set my steempress settings to publish immediately from WordPress to Steemit. I typically have it set to publish 30 minutes after I post to WordPress, but for this test I want to see what happens right away.
- I’ve drafted the post and am watching my blog to see if this post shows up while I’m still working on it. So far, so good!
- The next step is to try out theory #1 by clicking Preview. Nothing. Okay, on to the next test.
- Now it’s time to click Save Draft and see whether that causes the post to publish. Here goes. Nothing. So theory #2 holds no water.
- Okay, time for the final test. I’m going to click Publish. If this publishes to my blog more than once, then I know the issue must be a WordPress or steempress plugin problem. If it posts one time, I am going to assume it was a momentary glitch and all is good. Fingers crossed.
