Issues with Patreon Wordpress plugin: locking images and audio files embeds in Feedly app

Wordpress Plugin
1

Hello, Patreon! I’m a creator from Russia and, AFAIK, I’ve found 2 bugs in your Wordpress plugin. I’m using it to lock patron-only content on my site https://beardycast.com/ — it includes text and audio (podcasts).

And it works mostly great, but:

  1. There’s an issue with Feedly mobile app on iOS and, probably, Android app and web-version also. While Patreon plugin locks out content from different RSS readers, native Feedly application shows embedded audio that must be locked (but it works fine with locked text). I’ve added screenshot that you can visualize what I’m talking about and get a look into it;

  2. After you’ve added feature to lock out partial content on the site via plugin, it got mad. After I’ve installed SSL certificate, sometimes Patreon plugin looses it’s mind and starting to lock out every image on my site. I’m dealing with it via customizing .htaccess file, where I’m disabling additional Wordpress plugin code. The code is:

#BEGIN Patreon WordPress Image Protection
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} (\.png|\.jpg|\.gif|\.jpeg|\.bmp)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !/wp-admin/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^wp-content/uploads(.*)$ index.php?patreon_action=serve_patron_only_image&patron_only_image=$1 [QSA,L]
#END Patreon Wordpress

I’m locking it out with <IfModule mod_rewrite.c-disable></IfModule> code. But it’s annoying since some backend and frontend changes triggers it again and rewrite Patreon Image Protect code in .htaccess file. After that I need to add custom code again.

Do you have any ideas, why that might happen or how I can permanently fix it?

2

#1 seems to me to be a case of the_content or excerpt filters not being applied to audio items when Feedly pulls them. Its not so extraordinary - some plugins or apps may skip doing that. I’ll take a note of this and see what can we do in 1.1.1. That is, assuming that you have a Feedly plugin.

#2 may have to do with site configuration - if you changed your website url to https from http, then any embedded image link in content may need to be changed to https.

Otherwise the protection code may not recognize image request coming from your own site and lock them all - ill take a note of this.

If you changed the url of your site in WP settings, you may benefit from using a replacer to change the embedded image urls inside posts to the new https url. Below is a widely used one, for WP, but you would need to use it very carefully.

and delete it after you did your process.

As for disabling htaccess rule - we are going to add a new option to toggle image/file protection on/off with 1.1.1, which is soon to come in a few days. That will allow you to easily turn off the image/file protection without any issues.

3

Also you may try clearing all domain cookies for your site, and then re-login to see if image locking still hiccups.