Redirect to /public/local breaks homepage when plugin is active

[Lanie-Carmelo]

Hi,

I encountered an issue with the Enable Mastodon Apps plugin that causes my WordPress homepage to redirect to /public/local, resulting in a "Page Not Found" error. The full redirected URL is https://laniecarmelo.tech/public/local, whereas my homepage should simply load at https://laniecarmelo.tech. Disabling the plugin resolves the issue, and my homepage loads correctly again.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Install and activate the Enable Mastodon Apps plugin on a WordPress site.
2. Ensure other plugins like ActivityPub and Friends are also active (if relevant).
3. Attempt to visit the homepage of the site (e.g., https://laniecarmelo.tech).
4. The site redirects to https://laniecarmelo.tech/public/local, which does not exist.

Expected Behavior:

The homepage should load normally at https://laniecarmelo.tech without redirection.

Actual Behavior:

The homepage redirects to /public/local, resulting in a "Page Not Found" error.

Environment:

• WordPress version: 6.7.1
• PHP version: 8.2.15 (Supports 64-bit values)
• Enable Mastodon Apps plugin version: 0.9.9
• Other active plugins:
  • ActivityPub
  • Friends
  • Accessibility Suite by Ability, Inc
  • AI Engine
  • Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection
  • Code Snippets
  • Conditional Fields for Contact Form 7
  • Contact Form 7: Accessible Defaults
  • Filester - File Manager Pro
  • Friends Autoresolve Links
  • Friends Debugger
  • Friends Mastodon-like Interface
  • Friends Parser Fraidyscrape
  • Friends Parser RSS Bridge
  • Friends Post Collection
  • Friends Send to E-Reader
  • GenerateBlocks
  • GP Premium
  • Health Check & Troubleshooting
  • Include Mastodon Feed
  • Jetpack
  • Jetpack Boost
  • Koko Analytics
  • Pods - Custom Content Types and Fields
  • Query Monitor
  • Reading Time WP
  • Redirection
  • SimpleTOC - Table of Contents Block
  • Social Media Auto Publish
  • SpinupWP
  • Squirrly SEO (Newton)
  • Squirrly SEO - Advanced Pack
  • UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore
  • Wordfence Security
  • WP Accessibility
  • WP Grid Builder
    • WP Grid Builder – Caching Add-on
    • WP Grid Builder – Pods Add-on
  • WP Mail SMTP
  • WP Sitemap Page
  • WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache

Additional Information:

The /public/local path reminds me of Mastodon's URL structure, so I suspect this may be related to how the plugin emulates Mastodon functionality. I would love to use this plugin to interact with my site via a Mastodon app, but this issue prevents me from keeping it active.

Please let me know if you need any additional details or if there’s a workaround for this issue. Thank you for your work on this plugin!

[akirk]

Thanks for reporting and sorry for the trouble! While it is true that there is a Mastodon endpoint that contains public/local (i.e. api/v1/streaming/public/local), I have a hard time understanding why EMA should cause those redirects.

On the other hand, since you say that disabling EMA fixed your problem, it might be some interaction with another plugin.

Since you already have the "Health Check & Troubleshooting" plugin installed, it should give you a "Troubleshoot" link on your wp-admin/plugins.php, thus it'd be helpful if you tried to activate the Enable Mastodon Apps plugin again and verify that the /public/local redirect starts happening again.

Then, click the "Troubleshoot" link under the Enable Mastodon Apps entry on your plugins page. You will enter troubleshoot mode which then disable all other plugins except EMA, but just for yourself. Check whether the redirect to public/local happens again, with just EMA. If not. Continue enabling other plugins until you see which one starts interacting badly.

With that, I hope you can identify a plugin that interacts in a bad way with EMA, and then we can work on fixing this. Thank you!

[Lanie-Carmelo]

@akirk I finally got a chance to check things out. The redirect happens in troubleshoot mode with only EMA enabled. I have the Health Check and Troubleshooting plugin installed, so I activated EMA and used troubleshoot mode to disable everything else, and it still happens. Let me know if there's any other information I can give you that might help you figure out what's causing this. Thanks.