I don’t know if it’s the same issue you’re having, but I had some reply comments that weren’t showing up once. I found them in the WP Comments’ Spam folder. Once I marked them as Not Spam, they showed up on my page. Might be worth having a look in there…?
Hey @jikamens 👋
When people post replies in the fediverse to my posts federated with ActivityPub, I get email notifications about the replies but they do not show up as comments at the bottom of my posts.
as @thevoidtlmb already pointed out, they should indeed show up and checking the spam folder would also be my first recommendation.
If there are no comments, can you maybe send us the blogs URL, so that we can check? May I also ask where you host your site?
The comments are not in my spam folder.
The blog is https://blog.kamens.us/. It’s self-hosted.
Sorry about the delayed reply. For some reason I did not get email notifications about your comments even though I requested them. *sigh*
No problem ☺️
When you mean „self hosted“ what does that mean? A server you manage? Or a WordPress/Shared Hosting? I am asking because some hosts like Bluehost or Siteground do block necessary endpoints/requests!
I mean it’s on a server that I manage, running in my ~/public_html folder and served by Apache httpd.
Ok, nice! Do you have mod-sec or something similar on place?
Can you check if something is blocking POST requests with an application/activity+json Accept header?
I do not believe any POST requests are being blocked. Certainly I haven’t set anything up to intentionally block them.
If they were being blocked then would I be getting the email notifications about replies? I.e., every time someone replies I get email from my blog server with “Mention from:” in the subject and “You were mentioned! Looks like someone’s talking about you!” etc. in the body.
What URLs should I be seeing in the server logs?
I see a bunch of POSTs to various /wp-json/activitypub URLs with status code 200 or 202, and a very occasional 403.
I don’t supposed the plugin requires any directories within the wordpress file hierarchy to be writeable by the web server? I have permissions locked down, so if the plugin needs to save anything to disk I’ll need to figure out what directory/ies it needs to write to and update their permissions. This seems unlikely since I would expect it to store data in the database rather than in the filesystem, and since I checked the error log and don’t see any errors about failures to write files to disk, but I thought I should check if this is a possible explanation for what’s going wrong.
It tries to locally cache avatars! You can try to disable caching by setting
define( 'ACTIVITYPUB_DISABLE_REMOTE_CACHE', true );
Hmm, I don’t think that’s it. I have the uploads directory writeable, and I see an activitypub directory within that directory, and it has a bunch of files in it, so I think that caching is working.
However, one interesting thing I noticed: I _changed_ the permissions recursively on the uploads directory so that it was no longer owned by apache or writeable, and then I reloaded the welcome page, and the “Check your site’s health” bar on the welcome page was still green and not indicating any errors, so I’m not sure the permissions check for the uploads directory in the plugin is working properly?
In any case, do you have any other suggestions for what I can check to see if I can figure out why comments are not working?
