Buddypress activity page not working properly

[Leonardo]

Hi @michael! Hi @tjchester! Hi Fellow Boss users!

I need your help.

My activity page is not working properly. It seems to be just one issue that is causing all the following problems.

1) The “Load more” button doesn’t work properly. Instead of loading more activity, it opens a new page with the previos activity: http://www.site.com/activity/?acpage=2

2) When I post something in the activity page, the page gets reloaded (instead of the message being posted smoothly into the feed, as its supposed to be). The message gets posted but with a page reload. Also, I get a confirmation message (check attached photo).

3) Related to that, the buttons to filter the content of the activity page, don’t work (all members, following, my likes, mentions).

4) The dropdown (in the activity page) to filter content by comments, forum posts, etc, doesn’t work either.

5) When I try to comment in a post in the activity page, the page gets reloaded: http://www.site.com/activity/?ac=62/#ac-form-62 (instead of just displaying the reply box).

6) Also, as odd as it sounds, the page title for my activity page disappeared.

All these 6 issues happened all the same time.

—-

What I have done to hunt down the problem:

– I have disabled all plugins, and just had activated the buddypress. Problem persists.
– I have used directly the boss-theme in case my child theme was causing the issues. Problem persists.
– I even contacted my hosting company (wpengine) to see if there was something wrong with my hosting space. Nothing found.
– I debugged the page using Firebug. Nothing found.

—–

Please, your help will be very appreciated.

Thank you.

[Leonardo]

If you need to log into my site, please let me know to to send you the login information. Thanks.

[Leonardo]

And also, the LIKE button for the activity, also reloads the page. 🙁

[Anonymous]

@leonardoarias, @michael, @tjchester. I too am receiving the exact same issues, except for #6 (my title is present). I don’t think it is coincidence that I too have wpengine hosting. I think something may be going on there because I was hosting with hostgator only a couple weeks ago and since the move these issues have been present. I was going to hold off until I completed my site, but since this topic was started I thought I would pitch in. I’m not sure what the issue could be, but it doesn’t coincidental that both @leonardoarias and I use wpengine and I recently switched from hostgator where I didn’t have these issues. I’m not pointing the finger at wpengine (I’m glad I switched to them), I’m just trying to make connections.

[Alyssa]

@leonardoarias @ryanmaler this is a plugin conflict hijacking the ajax of WordPress/BuddyPress disable each plugin until you discover the culprit. Sometimes this can be JetPack as of late.

[Leonardo]

@tjchester I tried that, TJ, but no luck. I even tested in a brand new installation, where I just installed Buddypress.

UPDATE: I “temporarily” solved the problem. I just disabled “Activity Auto-refresh: Automatically check for new items while viewing the activity stream”. Now, it works. (try that, @ryan and let me know how it goes).

But, I would like to use the Activity Autorefresh. But I feel we are getting closer to the problem. Do you know what file is used for the “Activity Auto-refresh” feature? So I can debug even further and see what is causing the conflict.

Thanks for your help!

[Anonymous]

@tjchester @leonardoarias disabling Activity Auto-refresh worked for me as well. I appreciate the temporary fix. However, like you said it’s a nice feature so I would like to be able to have it active. Also, I tried deactivating plugins one at a time and that did not resolve the issue.

[Alyssa]

@leonardoarias @ryanmaler Please post your hosting provider, exact version of PHP, WordPress, BuddyPress and Boss theme.

[Anonymous]

@tjchester,

Host: WPengine
PHP: 5.3.2 (http://phpinfo.wpengine.com/info.php)
WordPress: 4.1.1
BuddyPress: 2.2.1
Boss: 1.1.3

[Alyssa]

@ryanmaler I’ll have the devs look into this since @leonardoarias sent me login creds. Please give us a few days to dig into this. WPengine appears to have issues since forever. Not sure what their issue is, perhaps they are WP compatible but not BP?

[Anonymous]

Thank you @tjchester @leonardoarias

[Leonardo]

@tjchester

WPEngine is compatible with BP. I chatted with them about it.

When your dev team logs into my site, let them know that I disabled the “Ato-refresh feature to make it all work, so they know they have to activate it to test the problem. Thanks.

[Alyssa]

Oh yea, they’ll tell you that until they are blue in the face. I’m not sure I completely believe them. They have a custom version or something that tends to conflict. They won’t tell you that but I guarantee they have a weird setup that causes issues we haven’t been able to uncover yet.

[Leonardo]

hey @tjchester First off, thank you for connecting me with your tech support team. They checked my site. We found out that WPEngine is killing the ongoing ajax call to maintain their server performance:

This is what my error log displays:

\n#8 require_once(/nas/wp/www/cluster-3015/MYINSTALL/wp-load.php) called at [/nas/wp/www/cluster-3015/MYINSTALL/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php:22]\n, referer: http://MYINSTALL.wpengine.com/activity/

I contacted WPEngine, and had a long conversation, this was the summary:

———-
Ian Wood
It just means that there are too many requests to the admin ajax at once, and our systems are killing the process
Leonardo Arias
ok. So, is there a way to increase the requests that the admin-ajax file can receive in my wpengine account?
Ian Wood
There is not any way to do that unfortunately. Having that configured could lead to major server issues, even downtime.
———-

So according to them, the admin-ajax.php is receiving too many requests. And, my site is still under development. I dont even have active users! Its just me and a few of my coaches who have helped me to test the site.

I did more research on the matter, and found out that if you’ve been notified by your webhost that your account is using too many resources and cite POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php as the cause, it’s likely due to the Heartbeat API.

I looked up to undersdand how the Heartbeat works, and found a very clear article (for those who want to know about it):

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/wordpress/heartbeat-ajax-php-usage#heartbeat-in-action

So, @tjchester I am trying to find a work around this problem. I even tested a plugin that allows you to modify the frequency of the heartbeat, but I had no luck.

Questions:

1) how do you handle this issue with your servers? Isn’t the heartbeat compromising your CPU usage?
2) Do you see any way to change something in my wordpress setup to make this all work?
3) is there a hosting company you recommend? I currently have this site in wpengine, but I also have a dedicated server with OVH. The only problem is, that I don’t have anyone who can manage it (and I am not a server expert).

I feel so frustrated. But I am not giving up.

Thanks.

[Leonardo]

UPDATE: Since it seems that WPEngine restriction will bring problems in the long run, I decided to test another hosting solution. I have a dedicated server, but I was looking into using a solution where I can scale up quickly, on demand (such Amazon platform or with DigitalOcean). So, I found this site: cloudways.com

They help you to set applications in these platforms (Amazon, DigitalOcean, and Google).

They got a 14 days trial. I just set it all up in minutes. And all works (live notifications), as it was expected.

I am also curious to try wiredtree.com. People talk amazing things about their support team.

Well @tjchester now we know that WPEngine has its limitations. I understand why they put a limit on the calls you can make to the admin-ajax.php, since their goal is to optimize their servers performance and they try to kill processes that consume significant resources for them.

If you got some hosting recommendations, I would be happy to hear them. Or if you got experience with CloudWays.

Thank you for having your support team check my site. That goes beyond what I expected from the Boss Theme. Very pleased with your service.