WordPress often introduces bugs in its UI, then fixes them after a few days. This week’s bug is a new trick. It seems to treat me as “halfway signed in”. I’m able to write and publish new items, but when I try to see the preview while writing, the preview looks like this:
Also, it treats my views as real views, which is the normal behavior when you’re not signed in. Normally the stats gatherer ignores reads by the writer. When not signed in, WP doesn’t know I’m the writer.
This week, after a long absence of real views (shadowban?) I started to see a bunch of new views. Oh boy! No shadowban! But a quick experiment proves that these are just my own. When I tried reading a few items that didn’t show views, they immediately showed the number of times I had clicked into them.
Before Dec 18 the one or two views were external. Most are probably SEO shit, not actual people, but at least they’re coming from outside. The last three days are all me.
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12/22: Still going on, but now I’m wondering if it’s a Firefox bug instead of a WordPress bug. Substack also sees me as “halfway signed in”, qualified for some purposes but not others. I updated FF at about the same time when this shift occurred.
Yes, it’s FF. I installed Microsoft Edge, and both glitches, preview and view count, are fixed. Will stick with Edge. FF has two features I can’t do without: (1) FF lets you click on the one remaining tab to fall back to a blank screen instead of closing the program. (2) FF also has convenient download add-ons. IE didn’t have either feature. Edge now has both features, so I’ll stick with Edge. Easy decision!
Polistra's Mill 