Post revisions in WordPress

With the duplicate entries I was seeing in Zoundry Raven,

I started to wonder if it might be something with WordPress itself, so I started searching. And I found a few forum threads about this. Like this one and this one. And the overwhelming WordPress party line as expressed in the forum threads was "but of course it should never be turned off. There is absolutely no reason to ever turn it off."

WordPress 2.6 introduced a new "feature" called revisions. I put that in quote because not everyone agrees that it’s a feature, especially since it cannot be disabled. I’m in the camp of not wanting revisions, personally.

See, with revisions, the revised copy of your blog entry is saved in the database. If, like me, you edit it when you notice spelling errors, punctuation errors, an updated link, updated information, or whatever, you could wind up with 4 or 10 or more copies of that blog post in the database. And apparently, that’s exactly what has been happening.

Because I’m nosy, I checked, and sure enough, in my database, there were multiple copies of a lot of my entries.

If those post revisions account for why those desktop blogging platforms are downloading multiple copies of blog entries, then either a. WordPress has a bug that means that this is what desktop blogging apps get or b. developers of desktop blogging apps aren’t programming their apps correctly to take this into account. Personally, I don’t know which it is. I do know, however, that it’s a huge pain in the butt.

I did further searching and found threads by people who want to turn revisions off or delete the extra revisions. But then this thread seems to indicate that it isn’t just revisions that’s causing problems, but also autosave, which also saves duplicate copies of posts. Of course there are plugins to deal with that.

I installed Revision Control, but still got extra revisions or autosaves saved to the database – honestly, I can’t tell the difference.

Also installed Delete Revisions – that deleted 80 revisions the first time I ran it, but then a day later, there were four more, which told me something else was going on (the autosaves).

That led me to installing WP-CMS Post Control, which, theoretically, ought to put an end to not just saved revisions, but also autosaves. Now I’m going to have to find an easy way to delete them. Easy as in not going into the database and doing it myself.

Author: LMAshton
Howdy! I'm a beginner artist, hobbyist photographer, kitchen witch, wanderer by nature, and hermit introvert. This is my blog feed. You can find my fediverse posts at https://a.farook.org/Laurie.

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