Social Media Sharing Help
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Hi!
I am trying to set up social media sharing on my blog and every time I try to share a post it gives an advertisement for “antabuse” instead of the post description.
Also, specifically when attempting to share on linkedin the title of the post i’m trying to share changes to “where can i buy antabuse in the uk”
How do I fix this? I’ve never seen something like this and it does it for every post.
Please help!
Thank you!
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Hi missteddeh. Let me see if I can help. Do you use any particular theme/template for your blog? If yes, is it one of those offered by WordPress or do you use your own? First, however, try a simple thing that might help. If you can, close all the tabs in your browser and, then, clear all browsing history/data/cache. If you don’t know how to do that, just let me know what kind of browser you have, and I’ll help you to navigate. After that you should also quit the browser and re-open it again. This simple trick might just be the answer to your issue.
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Hi! Thank you so much for replying! I am using the Bridge theme by Qode thatI purchased through themeforest.
I cleared my browser and tried again and that did not work. I’ve tried sharing the blog posts via multiple computers and browsers and always get that odd advertisement showing up in either the title, description or both and it happens with all of the blog posts.
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Hm… I can see it, too, now. So, it’s definitely not a browser cache issue. The good news is that I also tried the mobile version of your site, and sharing works as intended there. The issues seems to be isolated to the desktop version.
I also tried to run the sharing command for one of your posts (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundadvisorygroup.com%2Fseven-steps-to-developing-your-personal-brand-2%2F) in a separate browser window. This is a part of the command that shares your post link, to Facebook in this case. When I try to share the post, I still get the ad instead of the post, but when I shorten it and try to share only your site instead (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundadvisorygroup.com), then the add is gone, and I see the site description! I am not sure yet what to make out of it, but I will keep looking. Meanwhile, did you try using any other themes with your blog and share through them?
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Thank you so much for looking into this! I haven’t tried any other themes. It’s so weird! I am using the same theme on a different website so I will try on there to see if I have the same issue this afternoon when I have time to sit down!
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Yes, I think it is a good idea to try a different theme. It is very possible that you have a theme-related issue, either with its code or with an associated plugin. It looks like you don’t host your blog on WordPress.com, but if you still have access to WordPress default themes (that is, developed by WordPress), you can try one of them.
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I also asked my friend, who is a very experienced web developer, to help me look. (These shady ads bug me, too, every time I see them. So, it would be really nice to have this issue resolved.) Nevertheless, personally, I would still go ahead and try a different theme, without activating any unnecessary plugins.
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Hi @missteddeh, I was summoned here by @one35photo, hope I can provide a bit of technical context regarding your issue.
Here’s the thing: your browser (and mine and anyone’s, for that matter), when it requests the page, it gets back one version of it, while the Facebook scraper (the thing that decides how the shared post will look on Facebook) gets a slightly different version of it (containing the malicious “antabuse” ad). Looks like there is code on your site that examines the user-agent (Chrome vs. Facebook scraper) and decides which version to send back to it.
I suspect that the issue is with the Revolution Slider plugin. It has traditionally had security problems and is not recommended to be used. Unfortunately templates from Themeforest very often insert it into their code because it’s popular. I’d say Themeforest themes carry with them a big risk of falling into a rather low quality theme that will guarantee a royal headache at some point along the road, not necessarily right away.
You can try deactivating Revolution Slider (and if you cannot then switch to another theme altogether – one of the default WordPress themes, as my friend recommends above). Then, you need to check the same page using the Facebook debugger (it shows what Facebook scrapes to enable shared content on its platform): https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundadvisorygroup.com%2Ffirst-blog-post%2F
The benefit of Facebook debugger is that it can request the same page multiple times without caching it. It’s a more convenient way of testing whether the malicious string is gone or not. Just click on the ‘debug’ button every time you turn off a plugin on your site and want to check whether the malicious string is still there or not. Right now it’s showing up in ‘og:title’ and ‘og:description’ fields. I’m hoping that disabling the Rev Slider plugin will get rid of the issue.
Let me know if anything doesn’t make sense.
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Thank you so much for getting back to me!
I tried deactivating it, deleting it and using wp file manager to delete it as well. The ad is still showing up. I am using GoDaddy to host the website and they back it up every 24 hours so I will try tomorrow to change the theme and see if that works. This is so crazy.
Will update you tomorrow once I change the themes.
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I have switched the theme, but I won’t be able to leave it like this for long.. It seems I am still getting the same error when I share. The share buttons aren’t there anymore so I have been copying the link in and it is still giving me the same ad. Please let me know when you have a chance to look.
Here is a direct link to a blog page, it’s not as easy to find: http://soundadvisorygroup.com/what-anthony-bourdain-gave-us-without-reservation-lessons-from-the-master-in-cross-cultural-communications/
I also used linkedin to check: https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect/http:%2F%2Fsoundadvisorygroup.com%2Fmr-rogers-five-essential-truths-of-his-communications%2F
This is so bizarre.
Thank you!
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Hi,
The Facebook scraper is not showing the ‘antabuse’ string anymore:
Perhaps the LinkedIn inspector caches the old content. Personally I wouldn’t use LinkedIn inspector because it seems unreliable: it’s complaining that ‘og:image’ tag is not present on the page when it is, in fact, there.
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Hi!
So it is the theme causing this problem then? What would you recommend my next move be? Should I reach out to the developers or is there an easier way to fix it? My support has lapsed so I think I’ll have to pay again to ask for ‘help’
Thank you!
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Yes, it’s very likely the theme. If I were you I’d try to reach out to the developers somehow because, even though it’s technically a support request, it’s also a security breach and they should fix this for free.
If you cannot find an avenue to get in touch with them as a last resort you can try leaving a one-star review on Themeforest – of course it’s best to omit emotions and only include facts. That would hopefully get their attention. :)
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An update… They refused to acknowledge that it was theme and said the only option was to use Yoast SEO… An extra step in order to share the original title and description of the article… my client is so unhappy, we turned sharing off.
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Sorry to hear that! For the future it’s best to stay away from Themeforest themes if at all possible. Smaller theme shops are more expensive but usually less headache down the road.
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Name Servers
NS07.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS08.DOMAINCONTROL.COMHi there, doing a WHOIS search, it looks like soundadvisorygroup.com is hosted on GoDaddy and is using the open source WordPress software.
For future help, it’s best to post to the community forums at https://wordpress.org/support/forums where they have more experience with the software you are using or search the documentation on the WordPress.org site.
These forums assist users of the WordPressdotcom platform. To understand the difference between WordPressdotcom (where we are ) and the open source WordPress software, please see https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
Best wishes.
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