Known Issues - ViSPR

KNOWN ISSUES

Last Update: 21. October 2024

There are a few known issues when you cannot connect the WordPress plugin to your user profile. See the info below on how to fix this.

1. Please check if any of these known issues apply to your case:

Update: ViSPR CAN work with CLOUDFLARE! There is an option setting in Cloudflare to allowlist a certain domain. So enter vispr.net in this field and solve the 403 “not allowed” error that is caused by Cloudflare blocking the external API access to the ViSPR server.

Update 2: Cloudflare has removed this screen from new versions of their plugin. It is still possible to do, but you might have to contact their support to point you in the right direction.

2. You cannot connect after first installation OR reconnect after Plugin reinstallation

How to solve the „Cannot connect” Problem:

  1. Create a new password for the user
  2. Use the username instead of the email address to connect the plugin to our server
  3. Deactivate all your caching and security plugins for the setup process, then try again.
  4. If you have reinstalled the plugin after not using it for some time or migrated your hosting to a new server: Please ask our support to revoke your API token.
  5. Get a dedicated IP for your webhosting. (see below…)

Update: 2.1 How to solve the blacklisting/block of a „Shared Hosting”: Get a Dedicated IP Address!

About 1% of all user accounts just can´t connect the plugin, and it is not obvious why this happens because there is no error message or info, it just does not work. In all these cases, it´s the same problem: It´s related to shared hosting services.

It is a longer story how we found out about this, but the gist is that our hosting is actively blocking certain IPs that are on a special security list from third-party blacklist providers. That means, if you or your clients use a cheap web hosting with hundreds of other websites on the same server IP, it is likely that one of the other websites has been flagged as a “bad actor“. The problem is that the IP of this bad actor is blacklisted and reported to other hosting companies to use as a general blacklist. And of course, all other normal and friendly websites are blocked as well, because they have the same IP address.

There is absolutely nothing we can do to fix this, as our hosting provider told us explicitly that they are not going to whitelist any blacklisted IPs because that would open the whole server network to attacks from all other users on this same IP.

The solution is relatively easy though: You need to make sure that these client accounts are using a dedicated IP. A dedicated IP is a unique IP address for their own server or website. Every web hosting provider offers so-called VPNs, virtual private networks that come with a private „dedicated“ IP address. This is already commonly used for sending emails through your own server, where a bad sender reputation from a spam sender on the same IP could hurt or even blacklist your whole website. This is exactly the same situation, only on a web hosting level.

3. Web Hosting Providers that block the server connection by default OR are blacklisted when using a shared hosting!

Some hosting providers have been found to set an unnecessarily high level of restrictions in favor of “Security.” In this case, you need to contact their support team and ask them to lower their restrictions and whitelist our API call URL (see below in 3.1). If they do not comply, the ViSPR plugin will only work after a website migration to another hosting provider.

The solution is easy: Upgrade to a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to get a dedicated IP address.

3.1 Whitelisting the API Call with Web Hosting Providers

Some hosting providers, as well as security and caching plugins can potentially automatically block our API call. This is known to be true for WordFence, Siteground Security, and Cloudflare.

Note: This will NOT work if you are using shared hosting with a blacklisted IP address! (See above!)

In this case, you can WHITELIST either our website domain vispr.net OR if you need to whitelist the API call URL itself, this is the URL you are looking for:

https://vispr.net/wp-json/vispr-server/v1/vmember

4. Hosting Server Config Problems related to timeout (cURL)

When you get an error “cURL error 28: Connection timed out after 5000 milliseconds“, this is a problem with your hosting server configuration, not the ViSPR plugin.

Here are two sites that show you how to fix this. Whichever works best for you:

https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-curl-error-28-connection-timed-out-after-x-milliseconds/

https://docs.presscustomizr.com/article/326-how-to-fix-a-curl-error-28-connection-timed-out-in-wordpress

If you need help with that, please ask your developer or hosting provider.

5. How to fix the errors shown on the reporting page?

Valid Membership Role: An error will appear if your user role is not set up to an active membership plan.

Valid Main Category: An error will appear if your main category is not set up.

Valid Partner Page URL: An error will appear if you have actively deleted the partner page, changed the URL, or changed it to pending or draft mode.

Live Page Status is 200: An error will appear if your pages are permanently cached (using static or non-dynamic cache), or the website is in maintenance mode.

How to solve the „200 error“ for new installations:

  1. Click on „Recheck System status“ button. It should immediately show the green check icon for this error.
  2. Reload the reporting page. It should immediately remove the red error background in the „Congratulations“ box.
  3. It now takes 24h for our system to recalculate the matchmaking and show your backlink partners.
Valid Page Meta Tags: An error will only appear if you have actively changed the meta tag and/or robots.txt settings for the partner page URL from “follow” to “nofollow” and/or “index” to “noindex”.

Or if an installed caching-, SEO-, or security plugin has automatically changed these meta tag values from the default setup. Most of the times, your web hosting is denying these settings and applying automated “nofollow” and “Noindex” attributes. It is recommended to always ask your hosting support first before reporting an error to our support.

Valid Domain Authority: An error will appear if we cannot extract your website’s domain authority. In this case, please contact support, as we can manually fix this for you.
SPAMscore is below 20: An error will appear if the SPAMscore of your website is higher than 20. In this case, you are being blocked until you update your website and remove anything that increases your SPAMscore. After taking these actions, you can manually check your SPAMscore and let our support know to recheck this value, so we can manually update this data for you. Only then can you become unblocked and rejoin the partner network.

Tool to check your DA and SS https://websiteseochecker.com/bulk-check-page-authority/

Blog Post for understanding and optimizing your SPAMscore https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score

In all of the above cases, please manually apply the fixes and wait for 24h for our system to update your data.

After the set cached data period is over, you will be automatically matched with other partners again.

6. What to do if nothing works?

If nothing works, and your hosting provider does not block the API call, then it is 99% a shared hosting server problem and the IP address of your web hosting is on a blacklist. The best guess is to get a dedicated IP address as this is most likely guaranteed to solve the connection problem immediately.

Other than that, we offer a paid installation with a one-time fee. Please consider giving our developer temporary admin access to your WordPress so we can try to fix this for you. But: due to the experiences we had in the past, we will most likely find out that your IP is blacklisted and thus actively blocked. It might be more cost effective for you to personally reach out to our Siteground Hosting support FIRST, to learn if your server IP is on their blacklist or not. In this case, please get a dedicated IP address from your web hosting provider.

Of course, we are also only human and make mistakes! We are very thankful for everyone trying to help us learn more about any bugs or issues, and you might be able to spot a nasty bug that we can fix for everyone else :) In this case, feel free to reach out to support @ vispr .net