Abandoned plugins not detected

The value for “Abandoned plugins/themes tolerance” is set to 365 (default), and in the overview for a child it says 0 abandoned plugins/themes.
However, in the plugin list right below that box, when I click a plugin for more information, some are way older than that.
I found eg “Advanced Automatic Updates 1.0.2” and “Better Delete Revision 1.6.1” in the list where the popup says “Last Updated: 2 years ago”, or “Last Updated: 6 years ago”! I only noticed that because I was checking the Wordfence warnings when I went to the child’s wpadmin page.
Do I need to do anything else to active the check for abandoned plugins?

Hi @phosis,

thanks for reaching out.
Can you please check if you have these 2 plugins added to the ignored list?

Hi Bodgan,
the ignore lists are all empty. That’s why I’m a bit baffled and wonder if I missed something obvious.

I just did a fresh test-install of the current WordPress and removed all plugins/themes (except 2021).
Then I added MainWP, and MainWP Child and set it up to manage itself.
After that I ran “wp plugin install better-delete-revision --version=1.6.1” and “wp plugin activate better-delete-revision” to add the abandoned plugin.
It shows up in MainWP after doing a sync, and there are no updates or abandoned plugins listed; but clicking on the plugin details says the last update was 6 years ago.
I hope this helps to reproduce it

Hi @phosis,

thanks for getting back to me.

I was able to duplicate this problem too. But only with these 2 plugins. I wonder if there is a problem on the WP API side.

I will have our dev team check this and confirm.

Thanks for your patience.

Hi @phosis,

thanks for your patience.

I have update to this problem.

I just rechecked my setup and noticed that it detected mentioned plugins.

Since the check process runs once a day, it just needed some time.

Can you tell me when did you install these plugins? Has it been more than 24h?

Hi Bogdan,
thanks for looking into it.

The plugins were already present before I added the child to MainWP; that has been months ago.

Hi phosis

thanks for verifying that.

Would you mind opening a private Help Desk ticket so we can collect some additional information & investigate further?

This is actually a very helpful thread. A couple of days ago I posted about the fact that MainWP even after several weeks of usage wouldn’t show any outdated themes or plugins, even though I know there are some which haven’t been updated for considerably longer than a year, which led me to think that it only counts the 365 days from the moment of its own installation, so that it would only show anything as outdated a year later.

After having read this discussion I set the period to 20 days, as MainWP has been installed longer than that, and sure enough, today it shows me a huge number of outdated themes and plugins. So maybe the whole functionality simply did not run before I changed the setting for the first time?

Hi Robin,

By design, MainWP doesn’t need to wait for 365 days before it starts reporting properly if the tolerance is set for 365 days.

It’s designed to simply check the “Last Updated” tag in WP.org API for plugins and if it’s longer than the tolerance has been set, it will report.

However, this is a Cron-driven operation so it is possible that the process has been failing for you due to WP Cron inactivity.

Can you try to reset it back to 365 days tolerance, resync your sites, and wait to see how it goes? Since this is a once-a-day scheduled operation, it might be best to wait for 24h and see how it goes.

It would be possible for it to drop the occasional cron job, though I do have 50+ visitors daily. But for two months since installation it never worked even once, even though syncing daily with almost 40 sites, sending a mail about it and checking on availability and WordPress state. This made me think, erroneously, that the term of 365 days was some kind of internal counter from installation.

When I changed the reference value to 20 days the next day I had a huge list of outdated plugins and themes, and reverting that back to 365 days gave me a shorter -and correct- list of plugins and themes on those sites which have indeed seen no update for a year. So it works normally now, it just seems it needed to be set with a different value once for the cron job to actually be set up.

Hi Robin,

thanks for getting back to me and verifying that everything works now.

Not sure, there might be an issue with some of the older version when the plugin was installed and now resetting the values with the new version solved the problem.

Anyways, I will keep my eyes on this and run more tests to be sure that the feature works properly.

Also, we are working on a new function for the next version where users would be able to trigger the Check process with a button click. This should improve accuracy.

Since version 4.1.6, MainWP Dashboard provides the ability to run checks manually. Here you can find instructions:

After checking the site, missing abandoned item showed up.

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