I know I am not the only one to have realised that WordPress have ‘lost’ the reblog button. This has been going on for several days now, and at the time of writing, I have seen no sign of its return. It is, we are assured, the result of some unknown technical issue that has the Happiness Engineers unhappily engineering and not, we are reassured, the deliberate result of tinkering or the removal of a function that plays a huge part in the sense of community around here.
When I am away, I cannot do cut-and-paste reblogs, nor use ‘Press This’ from my recalcitrant phone… so I use the reblog button to share many of the writephoto prompt contributions. I am not happy about being unable to do so due to the technical glitch.
We are assured that normal service will be resumed just as soon as the Happiness Engineers figure out what is going on…
Meanwhile, I am catching up and emails, comments, posts and reblogs… so normal service will shortly resume here too 😉
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 
For one horrible moment, I thought it was something I said, as I had recently blogged about the joys of reblogging. I do hope it comes back, for, like you, I will miss its demise most acutely…
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I wouldn’t have minded too much if I’d been at home, with a PC where I can do a cut and paste job… but I rely on the reblog function when I’m away. I hate letting the prompt writers down.
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Hopefully, we will get it back soon!
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Hopefully…
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I hope if enough people make enough noise WordPress will reinstal the reblog button. I don’t think the Happiness Engineers get why bloggers want to re-blog posts.
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We are assured that it is a bug rather than an uninstall… If not, there will be some very unhappy bloggers…
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It took them three days to answer my query Sue. If it takes them that long to do something as simple as emailing me, god only knows how long it will take them to fix it! For years WP has employed patches to their software package instead of sending through a freshly written, non patched software package!!! It is inevitable that sooner or later any patch will malfunction, given the amount of redundant software not removed…
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Well, this is one they definitely need to get sorted…especially since the ‘new, improved’ version of Press This is ruddy awful cmpared to the older version!
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The real problem is that they can’t stop constantly meddling. WP needs to take notice of the old addage – “if it aint broke, don’t fix it!” 😉
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Ye gods, I am sure they would see that as heresy 😉
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😉
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Technically speaking, I have quite a small brain, so I never know what to do when this kind of thing occurs 😦
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Complaining often works 😉
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It is such a wonderful tool to give reach to excellent posts Sue and I agree that part of the community feel to WordPress will be lost if it does not return.
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They assure us that it is a bug, Diana, not a deliberateremoval of the button. I can see them losing a lot of traffic if they don’t fix it…so many bloggers use it, especially those who have paid for the Business Plan, monetised their sites and need high page views to justify their investment.
I just find it really annoying…and I do not like letting the photo prompt writers down by being unable to share their work effectively.
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Pingback: Communication: | poetry, photos and musings oh my!
I went into my WP Admin settings to the Sharing tab, and dragged that little sucker right back where it belongs.
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Yet it is not showing on your blog any more than it is on mine…
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Hm. Interesting. It showed for me.
That’s incredibly annoying.
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I know…
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After multiple chats with different happiness engineers, one of them sent me this link. I refreshed it today. Fortunately, it is a bug, not an unpublicized feature change. Unfortunately, they have no idea how long it will take to fix. Here’s the link:
https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/22491
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Honestly, you would have thought they’d have sorted it by now… Five days is way too long…
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Couldn’t agree more, Sue. I don’t know about you, but my views are down from last week. I received feedback from another blogger about my WordPress this reposts. So I began cutting/pasting. Tediously time-consuming. 😞
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Down by about four hundred views a day, Frank… and what REALLY annoys me with that is those views are directed to the contributors to the writephoto prompt. I try and reblog four a day as a rule, sending readers to the original post… which is the whole point of these challenges…to showcase the work of others.
I can only imagine how people who monetise their sites are feeling!
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Indeed! My site is monetized, although I wasn’t earning mortgage payments from it so far. Still, I’ve dropped an average of 50-75 views daily. After I’d just cracked an average of 200 daily views, too. Sigh!
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It does smack of the Big Boys not caring, doesn’t it?
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Yup. And the lack of communication and transparency about the bug is almost as frustrating! 😡
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Yes, I’m right with you there….
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I’d SO reblog this if only I could…
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There are words for how I’m feeling about that 😉
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Thanks Sue. I was hoping you had some secret, but it looks like you are as lost as the rest of us. I hope they fix it soon!
I am assuming that when you do use the “Press This” that you copy text from the original and paste it into the message. Something like that?
Thanks.
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At home and with a PC, Trent, I just cut and paste, add a link and tags and schedule as if it were one of my own posts. When I use Press This…which is rare since they changed how it works last year… I highlight a block of text before pressing the button and it copies it over though it does so without photos. Better than nothing, but NOT how I want to be able to work!
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Thanks.
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It has been a week. I thought it was just me, then I checked around and NO ONE had a reblog button so I sighed and moved on. At least “Press It” is working, though it is so much harder to use, it strictly limits who will make use of it. I’m betting they did it on purpose (it wouldn’t be the first time) and now they see the reaction so they are trying to restore it. This has happened at least twice before. They’ll fix it. Eventually. When they get to it. This is the way they roll. I try not to get to upset about it because … well … I don’t have enough energy for all that anger.
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Yes, I had noticed it was not the first time… I can’t see opinion changing though. We want it back.
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We NEED it back. Many bloggers don’t really “get” PressIt and even when you do get it, it’s a pain to use and inconvenient for everyone. I’ve gone head-to-head with WP so many time. I don’t feel like doing it again. They get me SO mad it’s lucky we aren’t on the telephone and I can’t just scream at them. Garry says it’s unhealthy for me to get that mad and he probably has a point. But I miss reblog a lot.
I think they keep taking it off because it seems to be one of the ways our blogs get hacked. There’s some security issue involved — about which (of course) they aren’t telling us.
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That would make sense… but they do need to get it sorted. I have a post on alternative methods going out in the morning, but they are not all that user friendly in comparison to the reblog function.
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A lot of bloggers are not very computer savvy and by “not very” I mean “not at all.” They can do the minimum, but anything beyond a pingback or clicking reblog is beyond them. They NEED reblog.
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It took me a while to work out what a pingback was…
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I looked it up on the WordPress explanation thing. It’s just a link with a different title. As soon as I realized it wasn’t a “new” thing, it was easy.
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Same here.. though it took me a goodly while to work out where to look 😉
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You can add photos the same way. Including your OWN photos if you want. Very annoying.
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Yep.
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Thank you for saying what we are all feeling!
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It has been bugging me for days now…
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👍
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They WILL fix it, whether you are bugged or not and they don’t care at all how you feel. Or how I feel. This is their version of happiness. I figure Happiness Engineers are engineering their OWN happiness. Not ours. It makes more sense that way.
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I just wish they would hurry up about it …
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Pingback: Way to go WORSTPRESS. – The Militant Negro™
Pingback: #PSA (2/20/2018) regarding the missing Reblog Button #feature – Frank J. Tassone
WordPress!! Wordmess I need to send my eldest in! 🌹
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I spent a couple of days troubleshooting this until I heard from a friend of a friend of a blogger who sometimes uses WordPress that it was a glitch on the server side. Then the re-blog button came back.
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I didn’t worry too much at first, expecting either its immediate return or an explanation… it was a few days in that I started to growl.
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I was angry when I realized I’d wasted so much time trying to troubleshoot it.
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If it is nothing obvious, I check the forums fairly quickly…it saves a lot of ire 😉
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I did and thought it had to be me because I saw nothing in the forums. I ran every possible combination of words and all I got was ‘clear your cache, make sure re-blogging is enabled.’
I should think that an email from support about the loss of such a crucial function would generate a mass email.
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I think a lot of us have given up unless we think it is a problem specific to OUR site alone. These big issues get fixed. It may take time, but they fix them. The things that make me even crazier is when suddenly, all my followers notices vanish … then reappear three days later in a giant flood of emails. What happened? They will never tell me.
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I hate that… and worse, when I appear to be unsubscribed from half the blogs I follow with no warning nor reason.
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I know what you mean! One day I logged in and only had 300 followers, for whom I would be grateful, but the previous day I had ten thousand–which also seem odd. 🙂
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I hope you got them back. I lost 4,000 at one point, but one day, they came back. I don’t know WHO runs their software division. Probably it’s better that way.
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It’s nice to have people read and respond to the blog.
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Happened to me too.
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You would indeed think so… they must have been innundated with queries, which could easily have been dealt with that way….
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When I worked in IT for pacific bell back in the day before ‘back in the day’ became a term, we sent outage notifications as soon as we discovered them.
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It’s common courtesy…as well as saving a load of work answering queries that one email could have dealt with.
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Basic customer service. Perhaps we need to revive the Consumer Movement. 🙂
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Customer service seems to be a dying art these days… and heaven forbid if the customer goes off script when you do get through to someone… 😉
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I know. I don’t quite understand the lack of gratitude from our global corporate class.
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The basic premise that it is the customer who ultimately pays the wages is not a bad one to remember.
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True!
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