RSS-related “fixes”

After continued discussions about the possibility of WordBay somehow not generating RSS feeds properly and possibly accounting for a reduction in clicks on the part of some users, I sat down on Sunday and took another in-depth look at the RSS feed parameters and the results produced by them. I do want to point out once again that the RSS feed is NOT properly (or at all!) documented by eBay, thus all scripts using the eBay RSS feed have effectively reverse-engineered the feed to one extent or another to determine the function of the different parameters. After painstaking work I now have a detailed list of many of the parameters and what they do. I had never actually written them out like that before and you will not find this list anywhere on the net to my knowledge - my “competitors” are probably keeping it to themselves, but I plan to publish these in a subsequent post. But what I wanted to know, and some users too, was is there anything about the RSS url generated by WordBay which could cause “rover” (affiliate) links to not be generated or tracked properly?

The upshot of my investigation was as follows. Comparing the feed url (the “rss.api” one) produced by the EPN feed generator, with the feed url produced by WordBay, and remembering that each parameter affects the results of the RSS search in some way there are the following difference:

Category 1 (differences in parameters with known function)

- some 6 parameters supported by the EPN generator that are not supported by WordBay, e.g. “Search description as well as title”, “Auction only/Bin only” etc. (I just never got round to including these) and thus are omitted

- some 6 parameters supported by WordBay but not by the feed gen, e.g. “Min/max price”, “Min no. of bids”. These I originally reverse-engineered from the eBay Advanced Search page and appear to work as advertised. They are probably omitted from the feed gen for simplicity’s sake.

I believe neither of the above category of parameter can have any effect whatsoever on click tracking.

Also, however, there were:

Category 2 (differences in parameters of unknown function)

- 2 or 3 parameters (catref, from and saaff) that are present in both, but whose function is unknown (like I say, no docs). saaff appears to specify the affiliate network, i.e. it is always set to afepn in the feed, and I though, hey-ho, what if this is not set in WB, THAT could affect tracking! However, a brief check confirmed this has long been present in WB - false alarm.

- 2 parameters present in the feed gen URL that were NOT present in WordBay’s URL and whose significance is undocumented, together with the meaning of the the values assigned to them. These I added, with the values supplied by the feed gen (which do not appear to vary).

- 5 parameters present in the WB URL (reverse-engineered from Advanced Search) but not present in the feed gen URL which are undocumented and which I thus deemed unnecessary and dropped.

In this second category of parameters of unknown function I can be less sure that one of them does not have anything to do with tracking. However, I think it unlikely that the changes I made will change anything: a) we still have no firm evidence that invalid (untrackable) links are being produced through the feed in WordBay and b) it is likely that provided the campaign ID, i.e. the afepn parameter (and probably saaff) are specified, rover links are being produced correctly.

In addition, I took this new version of the plugin and refreshed a listings test page a total of 30 times - 10 times each for US, UK and DE eBay sites, and did not get anything but valid “rover” links every time. I also tried this (though somewhat fewer times) with v1.22 and got the same result.

I also created a test campaign and tried to get some clicks tracked (yes, clicking my own links - so ban me) but these were not tracked at all, probably because I was logged in to eBay or something, so this proves nothing really.

But if there is any chance that this will make any difference I am glad I took the time to investigate this and clean up the code in WB. Keep me posted. At the moment I still tend to be of the opinion that EPN’s tracking is up the spout. I have tried to be as transparent as possible regarding the WB code, whereas we have no insight whatsoever into the workings of EPN and QCP…

Geo-targetting-related fix

Oh man! Hangs head in shame! It turns out that geotargetting has been fixed permanently ON for all users ever since it was introduced way back when, and all for the want of a single “=” in the code. That’s quite a biggie, and does explain some vague complaints from way back when that it was behaving oddly. So SORRY!! In my defence, it is very hard to test and debug geotargetting as obviously I cannot hop over to another country to do so, and also I live in a non-eBay country, but I am surprised this was not picked up sooner.

In my opinion this is not a major disaster - the IP database IS fairly accurate on the whole, perhaps you might have lost a very small percentage of visitors who were wrongly targetted, and on the other side perhaps you had some Norwegian visitors who might have bought from US eBay (say!) but I don’t think there are too many of those.

Anyway, it’s fixed now.

I have also added (from 1.22 actually, but cleaned it up a bit) a strong suggestion in the admin backend for people to subscribe to the feed for this blog as these kinds of critical updates are happening frequently, yet there are people out there still using some absolutely ancient versions of WordBay, which can’t be good!

Let’s stay in touch, I have a feeling the RSS click-tracking saga is not over yet…

Sorry these updates are so haphazard - it’s what happens when I only have one day to work on WordBay and I try to rush things. Hope you will now be up and running, with all the recent bugs ironed out and a couple of little new features. But if you see anything untoward happening I just know you will let me know!

There was an odd little quirk where links were appearing that were in the format cgi.ebay.com and not the rover.ebay… affiliate link type. This would happen if a campaign ID had not been specified - the feed API would return non-affiliate, “cgi” links, as was the case with the user who complained of this. But I managed to reproduce the problem too a couple of times and can’t work out why, since the site I tested on DOES have the campaign ID specified. Right now I am still at little jumpy because of the click tracking problems some people were reporting and that eBay partly admitted to, so I would like to keep an eye on that. If you see links on your product listings forwarding to a short link like http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370325891590 instead of the longer http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?… etc. then let me and other users know as it could be important!

After a flurry of error reports and lots of really helpful comments from users, I have revised the WordBay code and eliminated some small (for some people not so small) bugs and added a couple of little features I hope you will appreciate. Man, I haven’t spent this much time on WordBay development for a long time..! Many of the bugs are a result of some scrappy coding on my part from way back in the early versions of WB, so I am surprised they haven’t surfaced sooner!

Download the new version from the link on the left, or update from your WP panel.

Changes are as follows:

Bugs eliminated (we hope):

- the problem some users were having with path to the countries.txt file not working. Now believed fixed, see end of this post for explanation.

- some changes to ensure the WordBay plugin path is got properly in other places too, like when saving the CSS file. Might be the cause of some errors people have been having with 404 errors when saving the CSS, but need to continue to monitor that, please let me know.

- removed a spurious part of the url obfuscation routine that I realised COULD cause a potential bug (in a very small minority of cases). Now WB no longer tacks “buy” and “cheap” on the end of the URL. I never liked that anyway. At some point I would like to add a better encryption routine, but no time now…

- fixed the SILLY bug where every time you update your setting some more forward slashes get added to the single quotes in the css file, and those only in my comments! I finally discovered stripslashes(), sigh…

Features added:

- FINALLY added the product title to the URL, so now the URL looks like:

http://www.mysite.com/wp-content/plugins/wordbay/buy.php?buyurl=Alpine-IDA-X303-iPod-Sat-HD-Ready-AM-FM-CD-Car-Deck___aHR0cDovL3JvdmVyLm…

People asked me to do this aaages ago as it could have a positive effect on SEO (though I doubt it - a Google-slap is a Google-slap) and it also has the added benefit of pushing the ugly bit of the URL a way off the end of the browser address box. Maybe I should add another long line of “______” and push it right off!

- also added the product title to the “title” tooltip for links, so now when you hover over any of the product links, you get the little tooltip. Helpful and could have SEO benefits too (again, call me sceptical…) I could have added “Buy ” before this, or “…for sale” on the end or something, but that would be a matter of taste…

Hope this does indeed fix your bugs and I hope you like the new features too. Plenty more feature requests and ideas out there, but they will have to be done as and when my regular job, hobbies, not to mention 4-month old son allow me!

Oh, and if you want an explanation of the countries.txt path bug, well I was specifying a full http:// path to the file. However, when using the PHP file() function, not all servers allow you to specify a full URL for security reasons, because it could be used to access an external file. Specifically, fopen wrappers is disabled on some hosts in the php.ini file, so I had to use a native PHP method of finding the “internal” path. This also applies to put_file_contents, which is also subject to this limitation. This function is used by the CSS retention routine, so COULD be the reason for some bugs that have been happening there.

This SHOULD have eliminated some of those major bugs! But I am sure you will let me know if it hasn’t, though

To recap the Great RSS Change, eBay (see their blog post here) have slightly changed the form of the “rover” links generated by the RSS feed from this old form:
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/707-53477-19255-0/1?campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=&toolid=10005&
mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.de%2FElmo-Elchmeter-Bpz-Magicsport-Magic-Sport-2-2008-TOP_
W0QQitemZ220551167382QQcmdZViewItemQQssPageNameZRSS%3AB%3ASRCH%3ADE%3A102

…to this new form:
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx
&customid=&icep_item=350310730839&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238401&kwid=9020
99&mtid=824&kw=rss

We don’t need to go into the nitty-gritty of these links, you can see that the “new” form doesn’t have that garbled code on the end, but a set of parameters like icep_vectorid=238401, kwid=902099 etc. eBay have not really explained what these are for, they appear to be for some future expansion. However, you can see that the parameter campid=xxxxxxxxxx remains the same, that is the important one that tracks your sales (or should do). By the way, the difference between the two codes 707-53477-19255-0 and 711-53200-19255-0 is immaterial - the former is the code for Germany (you can also see the link cgi.ebay.de within the first link), the latter is the code for US, they were just being sloppy in their example. I mean, if you are going to show the difference between the old and new style links then use the same parameters! I will show that this is not important in my real-life example below.

But the point is this, that the only eBay RSS scripts affected by this change were those actually manipulating the old style link in order to “cloak” it. WordBay merely “base64 encodes” (a completely non-destructive form of encoding) the link exactly as received from the RSS feed, with the exception that it replaces the words “rover” and “ebay” with “buy” and “cheap” (but then changes them back again before clicking through). I will consider removing even these simple forms of cloaking if these concerns continue, particularly this latter one, where I can now see some possible situations where it might go wrong. However, again, this is not related to changes to the RSS, this feature has been present since the very first version of WordBay and would have reared its head anyway, and would only have caused the problem I am thinking of in a very few cases.

WordBay versus link generator

But I wanted to be sure, so I did a little experiment to make sure WordBay is producing its links correctly, so I created a feed within the EPN RSS Generator, and then created exactly the same feed with WordBay, and compared the uncoded links. And here are the results:

Link produced by feed from RSS Generator (UK):

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/710-53481-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=230430578964&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238431&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

and now the link produced by WordBay with the same parameters, for UK:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/710-53481-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=230430578964&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238431&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

I have pored over these but cannot see any difference…

However, some people also mentioned (and discussions on the EPN forum and blog have suggested this) that this may be a country-related issue. So just in case, I did this with US too, with two identical sets of parameters:

Link produced by feed from RSS Generator (US):

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=190373520609&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238401&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

and now the link produced by WordBay with the same parameters, for US:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=190373520609&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238401&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

Again, identical… Just for good measure, I made sure the encoded and decoded link, the one that actually gets followed to eBay, was OK:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=xxxxxxxxxx&customid=test&icep_item=190373520609&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238401&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=rss

Once again, the link produced by the RSS Generator and by WordBay appear identical.

Conclusion

People, I spent an hour or two more on this and I don’t know what more I can do - I hear your concerns, but if this is a problem with WordBay and RSS then I haven’t found it this way either. Quite simply, WordBay is sending your visitors where they are supposed be going, using the exact same link that eBay’s own RSS generator is producing. Could it be that the fall in WordBay-specific earnings is a fluke? Or else Google slapping those sites (which it is very good at doing)? Or else it’s eBay bugs under the mysterious QCP once again depriving us of earnings.

If you have ANY report of this problem, please let me know in the comments. If we can build up a picture of when this might be happening, perhaps we can narrow down the problem and solve it, if indeed it can be solved from the WordBay end. Thanks for your continued input.

- corrected the bug where the “Click for details” icon was taking visitors to an eBay sign-in page instead of to the item clicked on. Many thanks and well done to ChuckMcB, a faitfhul WordBay user and frequent contributor, who spotted this problem and its cause. We might all see a slight increase in sales after this, who knows!
- found some legacy Wordpress functions I was using that needed changing. You won’t notice the difference!
- corrected a small potential security problem - not sanitising $_GET data. Big “no-no” usually, but it’s unlikely this could have been exploited here since WordBay merely passes this data on to eBay. Still, better safe…

It’s got a widget, a lovely widget

You might remember that ad if you are from the UK. Anyway, I also added something people have asked about intermittently ever since the early versions of WordBay: - I added rudimentary “widget” functionality, i.e. the possibility to add posts to your template rather than to content. Now this is DEFINITELY BETA! I just want to run it past you guys to see if you can get any results from this.

It works like this:

Put this code:

<?php echo wbwidget(array ('searchterms' => 'ipod') )?>

…wherever you want in your template, say the sidebar.php (careful not to add the PHP start and end tags if you are placing this within existing PHP code!).

Replace ‘ipod’ with your search terms, using the same search criteria as you would if you were inserting between the ‘[wordbay]’ tags.

Now please note!! It is hard to get good results with this because eBay preformats the feed (using some horrible tables etc.) and there is not much we can do to change that. Hence you need a good minimum width to display the feed, and you probably want to turn off the “Click for details” icon. Maybe you can get better results than me with some judicious css. I certainly didn’t manage to get it looking decent! Let me know how you get on.

Oh and by the way, at the moment you have to rely on the existing settings in your admin panel, which doesn’t help of course. It’s unlikely you’ll manage to get your settings so they look right in both the “widget” and the post&page content, so it’s probably one or t’other. In particular you will want to set the display to a single column, I’d imagine! I have not yet added the possibility of adding per-post settings, that’s another thing people have been on at me for ages, but I am reluctant to take that on right now. It’s the next big job, though, for sure.

Well, as ever, all the best, and keep earning with Wordpress, WordBay and EPN! (and let the rest of us in on the secret if you know it!)

Oh, P.S. WordBay is now tested up to the latest version of Wordpress, 2.9.2 - finally!

I need to look into this ASAP and get it fixed - I hope it is not a complicated issue that would mean major changes, and that it will be a matter of a day or two. So please hold tight and sorry once again that this was not fixed sooner.

Problem with countries.txt file?

One user has also complained of a problem with WordBay not finding the countries.txt file (giving a 403 error) and preventing the countries being displayed in the drop-down lists in the admin panel (the countries.txt file simply contains a delimited list of all the country names). This is an issue entirely unrelated to that of the RSS feed, I am pretty sure of that, but if anyone else has had this problem please let me know. It sounds to me like the file might either be missing or have the wrong file permissions (no read permissions), but it could be some other issue relating to server configuration which I cannot really fix on an individual basis. This might only relate to v1.16 which I put out a few days ago specifically to deal with how WordBay figures out the path to the countries.txt file. The plugin now gets the path “properly”, i.e. the valid Wordpress way, so there should not be a problem as Wordpress uses these same functions internally too.As a “first resort” please do check that the countries.txt is actually present in your wp-content/plugins/wordbay directory. And make sure the plugin is installed to that directory too!

Back with a new version very soon I hope!

While I haven’t quite figured out what the actual problem was it seems to have something to do with the way certain plugins “cloak” links by encoding them, and the problem seems to have most notably afflicted BANS-based sites. As far as I could determine, all my WordBay-based sites are working fine, BUT I DO notice a big slump in clicks and earnings from around the time these changes apparently took place.

I would like to hear if any WordBay users have had this problem - while I am not actively developing WordBay at the moment due to the “QCP crisis” I don’t want to leave WB users in the lurch if there is some kind of problem.

As for further development of WordBay, well, as I say it is on hold at the moment (so apologies to any support queries I have not answered, though I try to get back to you all). I am currently working on some completely different stuff which is for my own consumption! However, I am improving my coding skills along the way, and I can still see WordBay getting a major re-write at some point. Just don’t hold your breath

I have kept quiet on the subject so far, but am now interested to hear how WordBay users are faring under the new system. Since our model is very similar I wonder whether there are any similarities in our performance (that’s assuming almost everyone has not suffered under QCP, as the cynical amongst us might be inclined to think) or whether the niche has more influence over our performance under QCP than the business model.

My experience so far

Here is a summary of what I have seen with QPC since the preview earnings appeared on August 18th. I am just showing figures for US eBay as my earnings with other programs are far less. Bear in mind I am paid in pounds sterling, so multiply my EPC by about 1.6 to get USD (at time of writing and rock-bottom pound!)

August seemed positive as it turned out my real EPC was pretty appalling - 0.01 GBP - and QCP was set to almost double my earnings, at least for that part of August, as it was showing an overall QCP EPC of 0.02, though I now realise this was pretty dire still. I have never been a big EPC-watcher (hey, who cares, as long as I am earning a few shekels every month, right?) but I now see that my EPC has been averaging about 0.03 GBP since EPN began.

Weird things noticed: strange patterns in QCP EPC over August, with almost all campaigns showing the same EPC for any given day, but varying over the month, so that EPC was a high as 0.04 some days, but ended August on 0.01 again for all campaigns. Now how can that be possible? Surely QCP is calculated on a per campaign basis! So how can all my campaigns show the same EPC on a given day, including my “generosity” campaign, which lumps together earnings from all “generous” users of WordBay who share revenue with me and operate an extremely diverse range of niche sites which cannot all be performing the same!

One theory was that this is the “pooling” effect, whereby small publishers are lumped together and given a default EPC which could display this behaviour, but I soon found out that a small publisher is defined as having an average of 20 clicks or less per day and I certainly have a BIT more than that (though not exponentially more)!

Still, I could handle my earnings doubling under QCP, was my overall assessment!

September

Started off with a terrible EPC of 0.01, but gradually rose until I had a couple of days with 0.08 and 0.09, i.e. about $0.14 USD - FAR more respectable - but then things slid back to 0.02 by the last day of the month, giving me an average of 0.04, as compared to a “real” EPC of 0.05 (strange improvement there in my actual EPC). So I was only going to be down 15% or so, I could still live with that. However, the strange pattern of consistent daily EPC across campaigns continued, and no explanation has been forthcoming on the EPN forums, despite a number of other publishers reporting the same effect.

October

QCP is live! What is going to happen, we wonder. It would be nice to see mostly those 0.08 days happening but… what do you know? EPC has kicked off at 0.02 and just peaked at 0.03 the first few days of October, dropped back to 0.01 and I have a sinking feeling… Whatever the explanation for those big paying days, it seems that a maximum of 0.03 EPC is going to be the order of the day for me under QCP. Downloading the transaction reports (make sure you download the All Events one), I see that this is considerably less than I would have earned, with a number of good-paying Winning Bids starting the month off. The most I can hope is that these will translate to an improved EPC later in the month…

So what now?

Well, the jury is still out on QCP for me. I can wait a few more months to see where this is really going but I am not entirely optimistic. Yes, like most EPN publishers I think the system is unfair, untransparent and ultimately less rewarding for many (most?) publishers. EPN WAS a very generous affiliate program, I must admit - easily my best earner and one of the highest-paying out there. I imagine eBay were getting robbed blind by black-hatters gaming the ACRU system and probably there has been a very common-sense business decision behind the introduction of the new system - simply put, they were probably paying out too much to affiliates and not seeing the best return, and this is their way of taking control of this, and in a way, one can’t blame them for this.

However, what will grate with many of us is the lack of transparency and the disconnect between the sales we are bringing in and what EPN is actually paying us. Ultimately many of us will NOT be encouraged to invest further in trying to figure out what on earth is being asked of us with QCP, and we will vote with our feet - frankly I can make a lot more than 0.03 EPC from good old Adsense, without standing on my head trying to figure out QCP…

What now for WordBay?

It DOES seem that the business model of sites using WordBay (which is pretty similar whatever the niche, let’s face it) does not bring in the mysterious “quality” that eBay is looking for, though maybe you will set me straight. I am surprised at this. The visitor Googles for “buy antique Persian love-god figurines”, comes to your site, clicks the exact item they are interested in, bids for this item on eBay soon after clicking through… Surely this is “quality”, as opposed to sending random potential customers through banner links? From my results it seems not…

So I have to apologise to all those who are waiting for me to add their favourite feature to WB, or to correct their favourite bug (I know, I know, there are a few emails and comments I have not responded to) - until I see what is going to happen with my EPN earnings in the next few months I am really not motivated to invest time in WordBay. At the moment Wordbay seems to work fine, with no major bugs, and no changes I introduce now are likely to affect QCP EPC greatly (well, what does affect it, we wonder…), so I hope you can live with that for now.

On the plus side, I am looking into what I could adapt Wordbay for - something similar could be written to work with Commission Junction, Amazon, or a host of other affiliate programs which offer web services. But it would take a bit of work, and I would have to find a way to monetise it, otherwise I cannot justify the work put in - especially not with a baby due very soon and the budget about to get a whole lot tighter! My wild coding days are over, I fear!

I would love to hear your experiences so far with QCP, your moans and gripes, your amazing success stories, and your ideas of how we as small-time niche-site owners can survive this and perhaps take the Wordbay idea somewhere else, where it will earn us enough to keep us in Persian love-god figurines for many years to come!

“…from today, 1st September, four new programs have opened on eBay Partner Network for the eBay sites in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Ireland.”

This should be good news, both for people wanting to target these countries, and for those using geotargetting and sending the odd bit of traffic to these eBay sites, increasing the earnings potential. In particular, the email states that Germany is the second largest eBay site, hence there are many new sales to be had. However, note that you do need to apply for the new programs, which I must admit I am not sure about doing - I feel like I want to attract as little attention from the EPN powers-that-be for fear they will start reexamining my account and do something nasty to me. Now why would I feel that way…

Anyway, be that as it may, to the best of my knowledge, WordBay is already set up to handle these countries - there is no need for a new version. All four new countries are available in the back end in the drop-down lists, and all four countries are actively targetted when using geotargetting (you just never got any commission for such sales before). The only thing I need to change in a future version are the brackets around those country names in the drop-down lists which indicate that these countries are (were) not supported by EPN.

Of course, feedback is always appreciated - if you are targetting these countries, let us know if everything is working as it should be.

The first time you install this new version, you still need to back up your WordBay.css file first! Keep it safe somewhere! Unfortunately, I cannot stop Wordpress deleting it if you update automatically.

Also, I realised from a user bug report that this version of the plugin will unfortunately not work with PHP4 - sorry guys, it’s really time to upgrade to PHP5 if at all possible (may be as simple as choosing PHP5 in your hosting control panel, though make sure all your sites work after!). It’s not really practical to keep providing back-compatibility with earlier versions of PHP - I am suprised that something like this has not happened sooner. If you get a failure like “Call to undefined function: file_put_contents() in…” that’s what that is. If you can’t upgrade to PHP5 then I suggest rolling back to WordBay v1.05 and sticking with it until you can upgrade PHP…

Instructions

1) You HAVE backed up your existing WordBay.css file, right?!

2) Update the plugin either automatically or manually. If you do it manually, you can skip the next step, since your old WordBay.css will still be in the plugin directory.

3) Copy your backed-up WordBay.css file into the wordbay plugin directory if necessary.

4) NOW, when you go into the WordBay settings in your admin backend, you will see, near the bottom, an area where you can edit your CSS file. From now on, do not edit the WordBay.css file directly - use the back-end, otherwise your changes will just be overwritten the next time you change any WordBay settings.

The plugin checks all the scenarios I could think of:

- there is no existing WordBay.css file (for some reason) and you were using a version prior to v1.1 thus none was saved to memory: a new WordBay.css file will be created using the Wordbay.css.default file

- there is an existing WordBay.css file (that you either copied in from a backup or was left after a manual update): this file will be used and again, you should edit it in the back-end from now on

- (and this is the bit we all want to work properly now!) there is no existing WordBay.css file because it got overwritten by the automatic update, but you had been using v1.15 (this new version) or above, and so the WordBay.css file was stored in the Wordpress database and is lovingly restored as soon as you go into the backend. Yes, for now you WILL have to pay the backend a visit every time you update - all these checks are done by the backend not by the plugin frontend - I didn’t really want the plugin bogged down with all these checks every time the plugin cycles, though I’m sure there would be a simple way to do this.

OK, this was inevitably more complicated than I expected so please let me know how things work - I have tested it quite extensively, but I know you guys can always find some scenario I didn’t plan for! And of course, this feature only really comes into its own once I put out a NEW version of WordBay, but you can try it out by maybe uninstalling WordBay and reinstalling it if you want.

Let me know how you get on.