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Troubleshooting

Almost every question below is answered faster by reading the log than by guessing.

The menu only shows “Main Settings” and “Upgrade to Full Version”

The master switch is off. Main Settings → turn on the toggle at the top → Save Settings. The other four screens appear immediately.

This is the single most common “the plugin does not work” report.

A rule shows the “no change” icon

The rule ran successfully and created nothing. In order of likelihood:

1. Every item in the feed is already imported. Duplicate detection matches on the source URL.

   This only produces “no change” once the whole feed is exhausted. A rule that skips already-imported items keeps reading further down the feed until it reaches its Max # Posts allowance, so a second run on a long feed normally creates the next batch rather than reporting no change.

2. A posting restriction rejected every item. Check both the global Posting Restrictions Options and the rule's own restrictions: title and content word counts, the Global Banned Words List (which ships pre-populated on some installs), the Global Required Words List, Skip Posts That Do Not Have Images, and the older/newer date filters.
3. Max # Posts is set very low and the allowance was used by an earlier run.
4. The feed itself is empty or returned an error. Open the feed URL in a browser.

A rule shows the red “failed” icon

Read wp-content/echo_info.log. Typical causes:

Imports never run on their own

The echoaction cron event fires only when WordPress cron runs, and WP-Cron only runs when someone visits the site.

1. Confirm the master switch is on — turning it off clears the cron event.
2. Confirm the rule's Active box is ticked.
3. Confirm the rule's schedule interval has actually elapsed. With the unit set to Hours, a value of 24 means once a day, and the hourly cron pass will skip it 23 times out of 24.
4. If DISABLE_WP_CRON is defined, or the site gets little traffic, set a Secret Word in Main Settings and hit the printed ?run_echo=… URL from a real server cron job. See First import, step 7.

A run hangs, or the spinner never stops

The plugin takes a per-rule lock (a file named echo_<rule id> in the system temp directory) so two copies of the same rule cannot run at once. If PHP was killed mid-run — a fatal error, an OOM, a hard timeout — the rule can stay marked as running.

Symptom in the log:

Only one instance of this rule is allowed. Rule is already running!

Fixes, in order:

• Reload the rules page. Stale entries are cleared automatically when the plugin finds the lock file unlocked.
• Check Activity & Logging → Rules Currently Running to see what the plugin believes is in flight.
• If it persists, the echo_running_list option is holding a stale entry; resetting it to an empty array clears the state.
• Reducing Max # Posts and raising Timeout for Rule Running usually prevents recurrences.

Imported content is garbled

The source feed is not UTF-8. Enable Main Settings → Plugin Options → Convert Encoding Of Imported Content To UTF-8. If it persists, confirm the mbstring extension is installed (Activity & Logging → System Info).

Posts import but have no content beyond the summary

The feed only publishes excerpts. Open the rule's Settings → Miscellaneous Options, turn on full-content extraction, then tell it which part of the source page to take:

1. Open Crawling Helper.
2. Paste a source article URL and click Crawl.
3. Choose a query type (Class, ID or XPath) and find the element wrapping the article body.
4. Put that selector in the rule's strip-by-class / strip-by-ID / XPath field.

Featured images are missing

Work through, in order:

1. Try to Get Featured Image from Content (Post Images Options) — on.
2. Copy Images From Content Locally — on, unless you deliberately hotlink.
3. Check the source actually has an image; some feeds carry it only in an <enclosure> — enable Append Media From Feed Enclosure To Post Content.
4. Check Skip Posts With These Words In Their Featured Image Names is not rejecting them.
5. If image resizing is on, confirm the GD extension is installed.

Rule settings do not save

Large rule forms can exceed PHP's max_input_vars. The plugin works around this by packing extra fields into a single POST value, which needs JavaScript to be running on the page.

• Check the browser console for JavaScript errors from another plugin.
• Raise max_input_vars to 3000 or more in php.ini.
• Activity & Logging → System Info reports the current POST size limits.

“Check for updates” does nothing

Expected. The update-checker/ library is bundled with this package but is not instantiated by any code in it, so no update endpoint is configured. Update by replacing the plugin folder manually — see Updating this plugin.

Settings look wrong right after installing

If a paid Echo RSS build was ever installed on this site, its settings are still in the database — both editions share the echo_Main_Settings and echo_rules_list options, and activation never overwrites settings that already exist. Review Main Settings rather than assuming you are starting from defaults.

Before you contact support

Collect:

• The Activity & Logging → System Info panel (PHP version, memory, cURL, DateTime).
• The relevant excerpt from wp-content/echo_info.log.
• The feed URL that fails, and whether it opens in a browser.
• Whether the problem persists with all other plugins deactivated and a default theme.

Then: knowledge base · support