Not possible to show RSS excerpt?

[jc2021]

I have changed the setting Reading > RSS, show excerpt -- However, aggregator sites that copy me still show the full article.

Any way to combat this?

[not2easy]

If your WordPress Settings pane shows

Reading > RSS, show excerpt

it is not the current standard and could be due to some plugin setting or theme settings because the standard options shown in Settings > Reading > shows options as:

For each post in a feed, include

> Full Text
>Summary

Your theme determines how content is displayed in browsers. (with a link to learn more)

Note also:

Blog Post Feed Content Options: You can limit the number of blog posts which will show on your Blog page, as well as limit the number that will feed into the RSS feed of your blog. The default for each is 10. You can also specify whether the feed will include a summary or the full content of these posts. This summary is the Post Excerpt metabox on the Create or Edit Post pages, which you can create in the post editor.

The information above is from https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plan/settings/

If you have no Post Excerpts metabox showing for your RSS content when you create that content, that could be part of the problem.

[jc2021]

Hi, thanks for the response. What you mentioned is indeed what I see. I just simplified it for the purpose of this post.

The current setting is set at 'summary.'

[not2easy]

In that case you may need to review the content and theme. When you edit a post do you see the Post Excerpt metabox under the text area when you edit or create a post? That is where you can specify the summary contents. If there is nothing set there, it may use the complete text..

Another point - have you checked your own RSS feed to see whether it is showing a summary only? It is not impossible that the complete content is being scraped even if you show only a summary.

[jc2021]

I do see the full articles in mysite.com/feed -- and the summary content area under the text field is empty. I have set an excerpt manually for the next article and I will see what the result of that is.

[wordpress.org...]

It says here that it displays a maximum of 55 characters, which is not the case.

[not2easy]

Yes, if you have not created a summary that may be why it is using the complete content. It is an extra step but it should make the difference for you. It should be like a description of the content so people who see it in your feed want to read the rest.

[jc2021]

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work. The full article still gets published into the feed despite the summary.

[not2easy]

If you have made sure that none of your plugins might have settings to handle that, then you may need to look into your theme's settings and functions. Check theme customization features if it is not related to plugin settings. Some SEO plugins may offer options for that.

[jc2021]

I have found no such thing. Neither in theme settings, nor in any SEO plugin.

I guess the only option is manual coding in the theme.

[not2easy]

Have you checked your theme's functions.php file?

[jc2021]

Nothing at all regarding RSS, neither in other files. But I might be missing something since I am not a coder. Might have to hire someone to look into it but I am sure the fix is simple and I am missing something.

I have tried using my original theme (I use a child theme) and the issue persists.

[jc2021]

So I managed to edit the functions.php file, and the excerpt seems to display on /feed
but I still see some sites copying the full content.

Do you think they fully scrape my site and don't even use RSS?

[not2easy]

That happens every day, see this topic: [webmasterworld.com...]

[jc2021]

I see, thanks.

Another question:

For Google News, I configured a snippet to show the RSS feed image.

function rss_post_thumbnail($content) {
global $post;
if(has_post_thumbnail($post->ID)) {
$content = '<p>' . get_the_post_thumbnail($post->ID) .
'</p>' . get_the_content();
}
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'rss_post_thumbnail');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'rss_post_thumbnail');

The issue now after fixing the excerpt is that it seems to override the above, and the images no longer show on Google News. And if they do, it's intermittently.