Scheduled WordPress Post Problems
November 8th, 2008WordPress features a plug-in known has Akismet, which filters out unwanted comments. There are programs running loose in the wild whose sole purpose is to inject comments into blogs that link to other websites. The mentioned plug-in filters out the unwanted comments, spam, from wanted human comments, referred to as ham.
A useful article here which provides additional tactics for removing unwanted traffic. However, one of their tactics to thwart unwanted traffic removes the ability to schedule future blog posts in WordPress should your server’s ip address change, as scheduled post will never publish when their scheduled time arrives. Manually running wp-cron.php didn’t publish the overdue posts. I tracked down the problem to the following htaccess rule.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^72\.47\.224\.86$
RewriteRule ^(.*) - [F]
The above rewrite condition prohibits traffic from sources that don’t use a web browser unless it originates from the web server. The web server’s ip address is hard-wired in the rule. This works fine unless your web server’s ip address changes, and this is what happened with my web host.
Any scheduled post due for publishing remained forever scheduled. Correcting this problem involves changing the ip address mentioned in the above rewrite rule to the server’s current ip address or remove the rewrite rule entirely, relying solely on Akismet to filter the spam that unwanted traffic may leave.