Email Followers disappeared after cloning multisite to staging environment

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  colcoll · Member · Jul 16, 2019 at 3:32 pm

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  Hello,
  We’ve been using Jetpack for the email subscription feature for several years. We recently cloned our multi-site instance to stage an upgrade and all of my email followers have disappeared from my live site. How can they be recovered?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  colcoll · Member · Jul 16, 2019 at 3:33 pm

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  Actually, the blog I need help with is http://sites.coloradocollege.edu/president/

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  kokkieh · Staff · Jul 17, 2019 at 7:28 am

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  Hi there,

  Cloning a site does not clone Jetpack followers, as those are not stored in your site database. Those are tied to the unique site ID of the specific site you have/had connected here via Jetpack.

  If the changes you’ve made to your site included a change to the URL, and you’ve since, or as part of the process, disconnected and reconnected Jetpack, the reconnection would have created a new ID for your site on our end, while the subscribers remain connected to the old ID.

  We can migrate the subscribers to the correct site for you, but for that we need to know both the old and the new URL.

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  colcoll · Member · Jul 17, 2019 at 3:21 pm

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  Great! Could you migrate the subscribers from http://sitest.coloradocollege.edu/president/ (staging)
  to http://sites.coloradocollege.edu/president/ (production)

  We did not change the url of http://sites.coloradocollege.edu/president/ or disconnect and reconnect Jetpack, yet the subscribers are gone. We cloned “sites” to “sitest” and the subscribers seem to be on “sitest” only.

  Thanks, Kokkieh!

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  colcoll · Member · Jul 17, 2019 at 3:24 pm

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  To clarify, we did disconnect and reconnect Jetpack on the staging instance to prevent unintended emails to subscribers while testing. We did not change anything on productions.

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  supernovia · Staff · Jul 17, 2019 at 4:38 pm

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  No worries, we were able to find the subscribers. They’re being migrated to the correct site now. Cheers!

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  colcoll · Member · Jul 17, 2019 at 4:44 pm

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  Great! Thank you! What do we need to do to prevent this from happening in the future?

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  supernovia · Staff · Jul 17, 2019 at 5:07 pm

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  I’m sure it depends on how you’re going about staging the sites. Disconnecting, changing the url, then reconnecting can cause this. I’m not sure whether changing the URL first, then disconnecting and reconnecting will help it. I can check on that.

  What I do know though: if you run into this again though, just get in touch to let us know what the old and new URLs are, and we can help. Here’s the link to Jetpack’s direct support.

  Contact Support

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  supernovia · Staff · Jul 17, 2019 at 5:57 pm

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  Here’s what I found through my colleague:

  Typically, Jetpack is supposed to recognize the site at a new URL and ask you if it’s a staging site or the live site under a new URL once you visit the Dashboard.

  In that case, answering the question correctly is all you need to do.

  There are some rare instances where that does not work, which appears to be happening here.

  In this case, we recommend that you force Staging Mode in the staging site’s wp-config.php file: https://jetpack.com/support/staging-sites/

  So, if you always use one site for staging, you can use the wp-config trick and be good to go. I hope this helps!

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  colcoll · Member · Jul 17, 2019 at 7:26 pm

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  Great! Thank you so much for this answer. We will definitely use the wp-config trick in the future.