comments throwing 403s

comments throwing 403s after being approved

[Lorel]

I just noticed that all comments that I approved are now throwing 403s. Can someone tell me why this is? They are all valid websites.

[lammert]

Maybe you can explain more? Is your admin panel in Wordpress throwing the 403 error when approving, the pages on your site with the comments when you visit them, or links to other sites which are mentioned in the comments?

[Lorel]

Sorry I didn't explain more. After approving comments in WP you can run a mouse over the URLs for the ones already approved and a popup comes up giving a 403 error. This happened to all the sites I had approved. I checked the websites and they are fine. Is this just a bug in WP?

[lammert]

The access log files should give more information which URLs are causing this problem. Recently I had a comparable problem with WordPress where one install threw errors in the admin panel when editing documents. That was caused by an old (WordPress 1.2) .htaccess file that was not compatible with the current 5.x branch. Between version upgrades, that .htaccess file had never been replaced. The errors were generated by problems accessing the www.example.com/wp-json/ URL, which at first sight had nothing to do with the individual posts but apparently is called by the WordPress system itself to gather post and system information. It took significant time to debug. Under the hood, WordPress has become quite a complex system. :(

[not2easy]

..the ones already approved and a popup comes up giving a 403 error.

That could even be caused by the domain in question using "hotlink prevention". The person who left the URL can't check it until after it is approved so they may not be aware.