Changelog - Link Whisper

2.4.6 August 1, 2024

[NEW MAJOR FEATURE] Creating the new Sitemap feature!!! (The Sitemap allows you to visualize all the links on your site, see the relations between your posts, and see what posts and domains are getting the most links)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to allow users to disable the Autolinking Scan. (Disabling the scan will prevent Link Whisper from inserting autolinks when they are first created. Autolinks can still be created via post update and the Autolinking Cron task)
[NEW SETTING] Creating settings to ignore specific posts so that accessibility icons aren’t added to links on the page.
[NEW SETTING] Creating Related Posts setting to allow you to use the first image of a post as its thumbnail image if the post doesn’t have a set thumbnail.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding options to only select Related Posts from posts that are in the same categories and tags as the current one.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding an Autolink Refresh feature to the Autolinking Cron task so it will clean up old autolinks that should be removed.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating a filter to allow users to programmatically decide if an Autolink should be inserted in a post. (The filter is called “wpil_force_include_autolink_post”)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Link Whisper license checks so that they will be more robust.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Broken Link Checker’s ability to handle posts with base64 encoded SVG images. (Would sometimes get stuck on posts that contained them)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Domain Report’s search so it can now support comma-separated searching! (Just comma-separate the links/domains that you want to look for, and Link Whisper will pull up the matches)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Suggestion Process’s ability to insert links into posts with base64-encoded images. (The image sources were so big, that trying to process posts that contained them would sometimes cause the server timeout to be hit)
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Autolinking Cron task to process posts from newest to oldest.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would cause posts to be listed as orphaned when Rank Math was active.
[BUGFIX] Fixing error notice to improve PHP 5.6 support.
[BUGFIX] Fixing empty variable notices.
[BUGFIX] Fixing dynamic property notice.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug in the Link Report’s search that would sometimes cause it to fail to find existing posts.

2.4.5 June 21, 2024

[NEW FEATURE] Creating a new link highlighting feature! (Now you can click on anchors in the link dropdowns, and you will be taken to the page that has the link, the page will be scrolled to the link’s location, and the link will be highlit for easy spotting)
[NEW FEATURE] Creating system to detect if a link was created by a page builder module that Link Whisper isn’t able to modify. (This is so you can tell if the link needs to be modified in the editor and not Link Whisper. To easily show which links are unmodifiable, we are adding a new status icon in the link dropdowns.)
[NEW FEATURE] Adding “Link Created” column to the Click Tracking! (The column will show when a link was created if Link Whisper has that information)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to use a custom database table for all link stat data purposes. (The setting is called “Run Link Stats From Link Table” and turning it on should make the reports and link data lookups all run faster.)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to exclude posts from the Related Post widget by Categories and Tags!
[NEW SETTING] Creating a setting to not add accessibility icons to links that contain images.
[NEW SETTING] Creating a setting to allow Link Scans to be optimized for speed. (The setting tells Link Whisper to work with larger post batches, and to minimize the number of times it accesses the database during a scan so it runs overall faster.)
[NEW SETTING] Creating a setting to run the Autolinking by cron task! (The setting is called “Activate Autolinking Cron Task”, and it works by creating a list of all the posts that could have Autolinks inserted in them, and then going down that list post-by-post inserting links where possible. The cron interval is every 5 minutes.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving embedded link scanning for the Broken Link Checker!
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the link validation done during click tracking to increase the number of tracked clicks and to better handle dynamic links.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the check if a post was created by a REST API call from an external source.
[IMPROVEMENT] Updating the Oxygen integration so it can work with Oxygen 4.8.3+
[IMPROVEMENT] Updating the date format for the Detailed Click Report chart so it uses the same date format as the site.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the click tracking functionality so it can better ignore clicks on nav buttons.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Related Posts widget to not display related posts when set to “Manual Selection” and no posts have been selected.
[IMPROVEMENT] Increasing the speed at which the first stage of the Link Scan runs.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making it possible to not add accessibility icons to links inside of “center” and “aside” HTML tags.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the license key checking to hopefully avoid accidental disconnects.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making it possible to programmatically define a license key. (To programmatically define the key, please create a constant called “WPIL_PREMIUM_LICENSE_KEY” in your config.php file and set the value for your Link Whisper license key.)
[UX/UI] Making more popups permanently dismissable. (Link Delete, Domain Attribute update, and URL update in the Broken Link Report)
[UX/UI] Creating status icons for links created by known Related Post sections. (Related post links are shown with a green arrow status icon in the link dropdowns)
[UX/UI] Setting the Related Post thumbnails to be uniformly square so they are always all the same size.
[COMPATIBILITY] Adjusting the included code libraries to avoid conflicts with other plugins that use the same libraries. (Should particularly help with errors when exporting post data to Excel)
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would sometimes replace unicode-encoded hyphens in Autolink URLs with em dashes
[BUGFIX] Fixing notice about undefined property when running the Link Suggestions.
[BUGFIX] Adjusting the Autolinking rule deletion so that clicking on the X delete button will only delete that rule if multiple are selected.
[BUGFIX] Fixing PHP 8.2 notice that could happen during the autolink checks during post save.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would make the link stat updating during post save take longer than it should have.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would keep Autolinks from inserting when posts were created or updated.
[BUGFIX] Fixing notice when saving the Click Tracking screen options for the first time.

2.4.4 May 3, 2024

[NEW EDITOR SUPPORT] Adding support for the YooTheme builder content!
[NEW FEATURE] Broken link scanning support for YouTube links! (YouTube links are unique because they always point to a working page, with the video availability being determined after the page is loaded. This causes the pages to always come up as working in broken link scans. This improvement checks further to validate the response page from YouTube to confirm that the video or channel is available.)
[NEW FEATURE] The option to show “Untargeted” links in the Domains Report. (Untargeted links are internal links that Link Whisper could not find the destination post for. In many cases, this is because the target post has been deleted and no URL redirect has been identified to retarget it to a new post. So the link is likely to be considered broken. To use this new feature, please go to the Domains Report, check the box to “Show Untargeted Links” and click the “Search” button.)
[NEW SETTINGS] New styling options for the Related Posts! (The new settings allow users to set the hover color for the post titles and widget titles, the font weight (boldness) of the post titles, and whether the post titles should be italicized or not.)
[NEW SETTING] A REST API connection option for the Site Interlinking. (Sometimes hosts or security plugins will block access to the file used for the Site Interlinking. This setting allows us to use the REST API as an alternative method of making the connection.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Automatic removal of broken links from the Broken Links Report when they have been manually deleted from the post content via the editor.
[IMPROVEMENT] A new method of saving the Screen Options to avoid blocking from security plugins. (At times, trying to save the screen options would result in a 403, 502, or 505 error. This was being caused by a false positive from the security suite concerned, and by going a different route to save the settings, we can avoid the issue.)
[IMPROVEMENT] The ability to use a post’s category and tag names as Target Keywords! (Added to the “Page Content Keyword” set)
[IMPROVEMENT] Sub-settings to control what parts of a page are used to create the Page Content Keywords. (The sub-setting toggles are nested under the Page Content Keyword option. Turning them off will tell Link Whisper not to pull in keywords from the related section.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding the “Same Language” settings to the Autolinking Rule exporting.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improved error handling for the Excel exporting.
[UX/UI] Adding the ability to permanently dismiss a number of common popups in the admin.
[UX/UI] Changing the name of the “Error Report” to the “Broken Links Report”.
[UX/UI] Making the Setting page tooltips overall wider so they’re easier to read.
[BUGFIX] Fixing empty index notices that could occur when adding link icons to WooCommerce checkout pages.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would keep the link stats from updating when a URL was changed from the Broken Link or Domain reports.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would keep the Page Content Keywords from pulling in the post “slug” during a Target Keyword scan.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would prevent the post type and category selectors from showing up in the Suggestion panels in category editing pages.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would cause posts to be ignored from the Suggestions when their URL structure is updated and Rank Math is set to automatically create URL redirects for the new destination.

2.4.3 April 17, 2024

[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to delete Inbound Internal links when their target post is deleted! (When active and a post is deleted, Link Whisper will find all the posts that are linking to the deleted post, and will remove the links from the posts. The setting is called “Remove Inbound Internal Links When Their Target Post is Deleted” and can be found in the Advanced Settings tab)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to tell Link Whisper to base suggestions on words from the post slug and not the post’s title words. (The setting is called “Make Suggestions Based on URL Slug Instead of Post Title” and can be found in the Advanced Settings tab)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to ignore posts created by specific user roles from Suggestions and Autolinking. (Allowing you to do things like ignore posts created by ‘authors’ from the Suggestions and Autolinking, while still generating suggestions for posts created by ‘editors’ and ‘administrators’. The setting is called “Don’t Link in Posts From Authors in the Selected Roles.” and can be found in the Content Ignoring tab)
[NEW FEATURE] Creating ability to delete Autolinking rules, but not the links that they’ve created! (When deleting Autolinks, you’ll be prompted to ask if you want to delete rules + links, or just the rules)
[IMPROVEMENT] Increasing the number of Spanish ignore words. (Up from 112 to 384! To update to the new list, please change the language in Link Whisper to ‘English’ and save the settings. Then once the page reloads, change the language back to Spanish and save again)
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the search in the Links Report always be case, accent, and diacritic insensitive. (So searching for “cafe” will find “café”, or searching for “hotel” will find “hôtel”)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the database queries in the Links Report to prevent cases where the Report is empty because “Show Categories” is turned on.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Inbound Suggestions’ handling of Target Keywords so that it will be able to match with keywords that
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Asian-script detection so that Japanese and Chinese Autolinking keywords that contain some Latin characters can be inserted.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating a caching system for Related Post data so pages that have multiple Related Post sections load faster.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding support for Elementor-based shortcodes!
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the REST API handling to improve the Autolinking’s ability to insert links in posts that are created as “published”
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the Inbound Suggestions’ use of Target Keywords so it doesn’t generate suggestions using parts of keywords
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the link reference deleting that removes links from the report when a post is deleted
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding check to prevent Autolinks from being changed by the URL Changer
[UX/UI] Updating some tooltips so they are clearer and to more accurately reflect the state of development.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that sometimes keeps the report exports from working.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep the Broken Link Checker from doing its follow-up check on broken links. (The follow-up catches false positives, so missing links could result in a higher number of false positives)
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep the External Site Data from downloading during a Link Scan.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would make the Link Scan’s “Success” message pop up multiple times.

2.4.2 March 29, 2024

[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to allow posts that are referenced by ID inside of ACF fields to be pulled in and scanned during Link Scans. (EX: You have a post with ACF content, and it’s being included in other posts as a flexible piece of modular content. This setting will allow you to tell Link Whisper what ACF fields are referencing the custom post, so it can fetch that post and scan its data to include any links it contains in the main post’s overall count.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Preventing the URL Changer from multiplying the “data-wpil=’url'” attributes in links. (The attributes are used for tracking when and how many times a link has had it’s URL changed. The problem is Gutenberg doesn’t like duplicate attributes, so we need to limit it to just one.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Autolinking’s “Restrict to Date” setting so it more accurately restricts links to posts in the target date range.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating Autolink “Refresh” feature to remove links from elements that have been ignored by CSS class! (So when you select Autolinking Rules, and run the “Refresh Selected Rules” bulk action, any links inserted into elements that are being ignored by CSS class will be removed.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the scanning for ACF fields that contain raw URLs.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating feature to insert Autolinks in post when they are created as “Published” via the REST API!
[COMPATIBILITY] Updating the Broken Link Checker’s identifying credentials to improve responses from sites.
[BUGFIX] Fixing empty needle notice when running the Autolinking at post save.
[BUGFIX] External Post Suggestion error that could happen when creating Outbound Suggestions on a site that’s interlinked with another.

2.4.1 March 8, 2024

[NEW FEATURE] Creating Inbound Suggestion sorting!!! (Now Inbound Suggestions can be sorted by the number of Inbound/Outbound/External links, the post’s age, as well as the default scoring for suggestions)
[NEW FEATURE] Creating Outbound Suggestion dropdown sorting!!! (This allows the suggestions in the dropdowns to be sorted based on the target post’s Inbound/Outbound/External links, the post’s age, and the default scoring)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to prevent Autolinks from being inserted if their target posts aren’t published or don’t exist. (The setting is called “Only create internal links when target is published?” and it’s a rule-level setting that can be configured for each Autolinking rule. The setting is on by default)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to filter out any Link Whisper created link attributes so they don’t display in the page source.
[NEW SETTING] Creating debug setting to allow the number of items to display on the report tables to be reset to 20. (The setting is called “Reset the items to display in the Reports to 20?” and can be found in the “Debug Settings” at the bottom of the Advanced Settings tab)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the sentence creation process to avoid missing valid sentences and to prevent sentences that are too long.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding link editing support for ACF fields!
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding optional encryption token detecting for use on sites that periodically rotate their “LOGGED_IN_KEY” & “LOGGED_IN_SALT” defines. (The alternate tokens are ‘WPIL_CUSTOM_ENCRYPTION_KEY’ and ‘WPIL_CUSTOM_ENCRYPTION_SALT’, and by defining them (with random text) in your child theme, you can avoid needing to reauthenticate the GSC connection every time the site’s ‘LOGGED_IN_KEY’ & ‘LOGGED_IN_SALT’ changes)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Inbound Internal Link stat calculating so that it’s trailing slash insensitive. (To prevent cases where links aren’t detect because the inserted link doesn’t have a trailing slash, but the post’s URL does)
[IMPROVEMENT] Updating the database tables to be able to process post IDs that are up to 20 digits long.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding linking support for page builders and themes that use the “post_content_filtered” content field. (This includes markdown-based editors)
[EFFICIENTCY] Making the link stat calculation at post save/update more efficient. (Saving up to 20 seconds during post save on very large sites.)
[EFFICIENTCY] Improving the text processing during the Suggestion process so that it’s faster and can handle much longer posts.
[EFFICIENTCY] Creating simple Inbound Internal Link stat updater to simplify the process during post save. (The updater checks to see if we can just increase the Inbound Internal stats for a target post without needing to do a full search for links, saving considerable time if possible.)
[EFFICIENTCY] Improving the Autolink keyword checks so they run much faster on large sites with many Autolinking rules. (This improves both the Autolink creation process in the report, and the Autolink inserting that runs during post updates)
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating system to ID individual links that Link Whisper creates. (Needed for future link-based features. Shhh… 🤫)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the URL-to-post functionality so it can better trace malformed URLs to their target posts.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would make the Autolinking insert process display a random negative number and then fail.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause errors when processing old Muffin builder content. (Only applied for un-updated posts from more than 3 years ago)
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would sometimes keep link inserts from being registered in Link Whisper’s event tracking. (This would cause “Link not inserted” error popups to display even though the link was inserted)
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause link data to be deleted from a post when it was updated. (This would cause posts to unexpectedly “fall” off the Links Report and be listed as “Not Scanned” in the post table.)

2.4.0 February 7, 2024

[NEW SETTING] Creating new setting to allow Related Posts to be sorted! (Now you can choose to have the links listed from newest to oldest, oldest to newest, selected randomly from the pool of available posts, or use your site’s default sort method. By default, the setting uses the “random” option to reduce repeated Related Post link lists.)
[NEW SETTING] Creating an option to prioritize creating Related Post links to orphaned posts!
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating feature to make extra sure that links aren’t inserted into Shortcode attribute texts by mistake.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding .webp as an image type that can be ignored with the “Ignore Image URLs” setting.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep the manual Related Post selections from saving.

2.3.9 January 27, 2024

[NEW FEATURE] Creating mobile styling system for the Related Posts widget! (You can configure the mobile styles from the “Related Post Widget Styling” section by opening the settings, and clicking on the “Show Mobile Only Styling” toggle. If a mobile style is not set, the widget will use the equivalent main style as the default.)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to hide the Related Posts widget when there are no related posts to display. (The setting is “on” by default, and makes the empty Related Posts widget only visible to admins. Turning it off will have the widget display a “No Related Posts Found” message. The message is customizable from the Related Posts Settings.)
[ADJUSTMENT] Setting the Related Posts “Row” display options to use a thumbnail by default, and setting the “Column” display to not use one by default. (Thumbnails can be manually turned on/off for either display mode, and this change doesn’t affect existing Related Post widgets)
[ADJUSTMENT] Adjusting the default size of the Related Posts thumbnails to be 150 pixels, down from 200.
[ADJUSTMENT] Adding some default margin to the top and bottom of the Related Post widget so that it’s not right up next to the content. (Doesn’t affect manually adjusted top and bottom margins)
[COMPATIBILITY] Fixing caching issue that could cause the Autolinking to only insert one link per processing run when dealing with Elementor content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating feature to clear out data from failed link inserts when the Link Scan is activated. (Old data could sometimes cause unexpected issues when inserting links, or make the “Links Inserted” popup randomly show up in the post edit screen)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improved the data handling for the link insertion so that data that fails to decode or unserialize won’t be processed.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding “cols”, “rows” and “max_links” attributes to the Related Posts shortcode!
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Site Interlinking’s URL validation methods.
[IMPROVEMENT] Encoding the URLs used in the Site Interlinking to ensure that Link Whisper processes them unchanged from how they were entered.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the Related Posts template so that styles are generated internally and then injected into the template. (To help cut down on missing index notices in custom templates)
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Related Posts widget to display in a full-width single-column when viewed on a mobile screen. (Doesn’t remove thumbnails if present)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the data validation in the “Custom Link” functionality.
[UX/UI] Updating the “Widget Settings” tab to now be called the “Related Post Settings”.
[BUGFIX] Fixing empty setting notices in the Related Posts template.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that could cause unexpected HTML to be displayed in the suggestion panel when searching for an external link with the “Custom Link” functionality.

2.3.8 January 18, 2024

[IMPROVEMENT] Creating an option to force the Related Posts shortcode to render on pages, even if the Related Posts widget has been turned off from the post edit screen. (Useful for forcing the Related Posts to only display where you want them. To use the force option, please enter this shortcode where you want the widget to display: [1link-whisper-related-posts force_display="true"])
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Related Posts Active checkbox in the post edit screen to update when posts are updated/saved.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Related Posts widget to not display on category or tag archive pages.
[UX/UI] Updating Related Post post type setting tooltip.

2.3.7 January 17, 2024

[NEW FEATURE] Creating a styling section for the Related Posts widget! (The section allows you to change the spacing used in the widget, the background and text colors, font sizes for all text, and the list-item styling icons. Works with the Preview feature so you can see how styling adjustments will look before they go live.)
[NEW FEATURE] Creating a “Preview” feature for the Related Posts widget! (No need to save the settings and regenerate the widgets, just click on the “Preview Related Posts Widget” button after changing settings to see how they will look in a popup window. When you are satisfied with how the widget looks, please save the settings. If you made any changes to the number of links or how they are selected, please regenerate the widget links after saving the settings.)
[NEW FEATURE] Adding an “Anchor” column to the Error Report! (Now the Error Report will list each link’s anchor text so links will be easy to find in the post!)
[NEW SETTING] Creating a “Row” display mode for the Related Posts widget! (You can select up to 3 rows to display the Related Posts in, and Link Whisper will size the items to fit within the rows.)
[NEW SETTING] Creating a post type selector for the Related Posts widget! (Now you can set specifically what posts you want to have the widget active on, independent of what post types Link Whisper is set to process.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding double check to make sure the Related Posts control panel only shows up in post edit screens when the Related Post feature is active.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding check to keep the Related Posts widget from showing up on a site’s Home page.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding feature to keep from automatically adding related post sections to sidebars that contain post content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Link Whisper Related Posts panel in the post edit screen so that it’s clearer about what it does and how it works.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Related Post text to fit the size of the post thumbnail if it’s active.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Related Post thumbnails clickable links!
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Autolinking’s ability to detect links in JSON content during the report refresh.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Autolinking’s ability to remove links from JSON content when the link’s rules are being deleted.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating feature to detect if the URL encoding gets changed while Autolinks are being removed. (Under some circumstances, the encoding changes and the links can’t be removed during the processing run. So when you refresh the report, many of the links are shown to remain. This feature will account for the change to the URL and enable the links to be removed as expected.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the link scanning so it will pick up links that only have images as their “anchor” content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Broken Link Scan to ignore posts that have been hidden by redirects.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the ability to process sentences containing links to avoid mistakes and to increase the overall number of possible suggestions.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the “Delete All Link Whisper Data” cleanup process so it runs faster and removes temp data.
[UX/UI] Adjusting the Report’s sticky headers so that the header’s columns will more accurately line up with the table.
[COMPATIBILITY] Adjusting the Elementor “Icon List” processing so that we can pick up links set as list item options.
[BUGFIX] Fixing minor notice about an “unset variable” related the Link Whisper Related Posts panel in the post edit screen
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug in the setting which prevents adding accessibility icons to links inside of specific HTML elements. (Sometimes the parent HTML elements wouldn’t be assessed correctly, and there would be a mistake in applying the accessibility icons)

2.3.6 December 29, 2023

[NEW SETTING] Adding the ability to include post thumbnails in the Related Post items!
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would allow Related Post links to point back to the post itself. (Please click on the “Refresh Auto Selected Links” button in the Widget Settings to remove the self-links)

2.3.5 December 28, 2023

[NEW FEATURE] Creating Related Posts functionality!!! (To activate, go to the Link Whisper Settings, and under the “Widget Settings” tab, toggle “on” the Activate Related Posts Widget option.)
[NEW INTEGRATION] Creating Target Keyword support for Squirrly SEO keywords!
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to force object cache clearing when mass link changes occur.
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to limit the total number of posts that are searched during suggestions! (So a site with 100,000 posts can narrow down the search area to 20,000 to reduce the time to generate suggestions)
[NEW FILTER] Creating filter to allow searching for suggestions to/from posts with the same page parent as the current post. (Very useful for content silos that use page parents as it keeps the suggested links within the silo. Filter can be found in the Suggestion panels)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Redis cache ignoring to prevent false positives in reports.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the ability to detect and delete Autolinks that have been inserted into JSON data blocks.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the internal domain processing so it is more efficient.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding filters to allow link URLs to be adjusted before they are displayed to the visitor. (Requires custom code. Pass “true” to ‘wpil_add_link_attr_allow_change_url’ to allow filtering, and filter the URLs with ‘wpil_add_link_attr_change_url’)
[EFFICIENCY] Ignoring base64 encoded images when processing suggestions.
[EFFICIENCY] Making the Target Keyword processing much more efficient during suggestions!
[EFFICIENCY] Making the suggestion text processing more efficient to improve suggestion generation speed.
[EFFICIENCY] Caching Target Keywords during Inbound Suggestions to reduce lookup time.
[EFFICIENCY] Filtering out duplicate Custom Target Keywords during suggestions to reduce the total number processed.
[EFFICIENCY] Optimizing word ignoring during suggestions to increase processing efficiency.
[EFFICIENCY] Caching additional sentence data during suggestions to improve processing speed.
[COMPATIBILITY] Fixing styling conflict with the Query Search Pro plugin that would make the Suggestions loading bar turn into a spinning circle.
[COMPATIBILITY] Updating the Broken Link Checker’s ID to improve responses from servers.
[UX/UI] Updating Autolink delete message so that it directly says that Autolinks are deleted from the post content when the Autolinking Rules are deleted.
[UX/UI] Fixing styling issue that would make the Target Keyword dropdowns misalign when open and there were 6 or more keyword sources.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would limit the total number of posts processed if WPML was active on the site.

2.3.4 November 29, 2023

[COMPATIBILITY] Adding the Link Whisper REST endpoint to the Perfmatters whitelist so GSC authentication requests can be processed.
[IMPROVEMENT] Clearing old export files when new ones are generated.
[IMPROVEMENT] Resetting the URL redirection calculations during Link Scan so that the most accurate URL calculation can be made.
[EFFICIENCY] Improving the functionality that locates posts based on their URLs so it’s more efficient.
[EFFICIENCY] Streamlining link processing during post saves and updates so that it runs much faster.
[UX/UI] Updating the time-calculating functionality so that it will use the site’s date format for Reports and Exports.
[UX/UI] Improving the date filtering calendars so they can display in Month/Day/Year as well as Day/Month/Year format.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep Autolinks from being added to ACF fields during the initial setup scan.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep the “Refresh Auto-Linking Report” scan from finding autolinks inside ACF fields.

2.3.3 November 23, 2023

[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to allow links to be ignored during the Broken Link Scan! (The setting is called “Links to be Ignored From The Broken Link Scan.” and can be found in the “Content Ignoring” tab of the Settings. The setting supports wildcard matching, so you can ignore an entire domain of links by putting an “*” at the end of a site’s base URL. EX: "https://example.com/*" will ignore "https://example.com/page-1", "https://example.com/page-2", and "https://example.com/category/examples/example-page-3")
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to allow link icons to be excluded from anchors inside specific HTML elements! (If you don’t want link icons inside table cells, you can set it to exclude “td” elements. The excluding applies to all parent elements, so if you don’t want them in tables at all, you can specify the “table” element, and Link Whisper will make sure links inside any of the table’s elements. (“th”, “td”, “td” > “div”, etc…))
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding Suggestion panel support for “code” tags! (Now “code” tags will show up with distinct styling, and the sentence creator will do it’s best not to break the tags and will actively avoid introducing formatting issues.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the link icon placement to accommodate custom themes.
[OPTIMIZATION] Improving processing for posts that have a lot of base64 encoded images embedded in their content.
[BUGFIX] Fixing error during Broken Link Scan that would freeze the process if a cURL dependency was missing.

2.3.2 November 11, 2023

[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to add accessibility icons to links! (You can now add icons to links to show when they point to external sites, internal pages, or if they open in new tabs. The size and color of the icon can be set from the Settings, as well as the icon’s hover title.)
[NEW SETTING] Creating a setting to disable the Autolinking insert during post updates and saves. (Setting is called “Disable Autolinking on Post Update” and it can be found in the Advanced Settings tab.)
[NEW FEATURE] Lazy loading the dropdown data for the Links, Domains, and Autolinking reports so they can be generated much faster!
[COMPATIBILITY] Updating broken link scanning credentials to get better responses from pinged sites. (Fewer false 404, 405, and 503’s)
[COMPATIBILITY] Updating the AIOSEO integration so Focus Keywords and Additional Keywords from version 4.x.x+ can be imported into Link Whisper’s Target Keyword system.
[COMPATIBILITY] Adding support for Rank Math “HTML Sitemap” pages so the page’s links can be scanned into the Links report.
[COMPATIBILITY] Adding cache adjustments to keep newly deleted Autolinking rules from being recreated and applied.
[UX/UI] Adding tooltips to the link columns in the Links Report to indicate what the different link types mean.
[UX/UI] Adding tooltip to the “Refresh Auto-Link Report” button to indicate what the scan does.
[UX/UI] Adding “Priority Longtail” and “Limit Insert” setting support for the Bulk Autolinking’s “Global Settings” configuration panel.
[UX/UI] Improving the Bulk Autolinking’s “Global Settings” panel to fix a few display inconsistencies.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding suggestion support for abbreviations! (Now sentences that contain common abbreviations like “U.S.A.”, “St.”, or “Prof.” will be able to be displayed in the suggestions.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Validating links during searches in the Autolinking and URL Changer to avoid errors and to improve search efficiency.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding check to help prevent cases of links from being inserted in Schema blocks.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the link inserting so that programmatically created posts can have Autolinks inserted in their contents when they are created.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Autolinking to scan ACF fields for linking opportunities when a post is updated.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Autolinking’s link counting more accurate when changing links during post updates.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Autolinking checks that run during post update so that they are faster and more efficient.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Links report filtering systems so they load the report faster.
[IMPROVEMENT] Reworking the link data systems to avoid errors when cloning posts and Link Whisper is inactive or not installed.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving compression on stored link data so it takes up less room in the database.
[IMPROVEMENT] Preventing suggestions and link inserting for text inside of “pre” HTML tags.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding the “code” HTML tag to the “HTML Tags to Ignore from Linking.” setting. (The setting can be found at the bottom of the Content Ignoring tab)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Autolink delete functionality so rules with lots of links will be reliably deleted.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the GSC keyword auto selecting system more efficient and accurate.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the text searching to avoid “offset not contained in selection” errors.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the link inserting to make it faster and more efficient.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting Autolinking to scan meta field based page builder content when updating posts.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the Autolinking rules created during the “Reset Auto-Link Report” scan to always use “Select links before inserting?” as well as the default settings for case sensitivity, language targeting, and term restrictions.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving cache handling for Autolink rule creation and deletion. (Should help with cases of links not deleting when the rules are removed)
[IMPROVEMENT] Updating the Autolinking Rule sample CSV to list the rule settings which are available for import.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would sometimes allow the Autolinking to exceed a rule’s link insert limit.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would sometimes unlink the first word of a suggested link if it came at the start of the sentence.
[BUGFIX] Fixing minor PHP notice when making sure that the link inserting was running at the right time during post updates.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would make the Domains report give the wrong page number.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause the Domains report to list the same domain multiple times.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep the auto-downloaded GSC keywords from being selected as “Active” at times.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause links to sometimes be reinserted right after they were deleted from post content.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug in the “Refresh Link Stats” page that would cause it to miss inbound internal links if they didn’t have a protocol (http: or https:) or a leading slash (/).
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug in post content check when a post is programmatically created.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep the Autolinking’s “Limit Insert” setting from showing when it was active.
[BUGFIX] Fixing offset bug in the Links Report that would make it show results from the wrong page on certain sites.
[BUGFIX] Fixing “undefined variable” notice that would sometimes occur when publishing a new post.

2.3.1 October 11, 2023

[NEW FEATURE] Creating Suggestion Filter to allow Outbound Suggestions to be pointed exclusively to Orphaned Posts! (The setting is called “Only Suggest Links to Orphaned Posts” and it’s right above the “Show Link Suggestions in the Same Category as This Post” setting in the Outbound Suggestion panel.)
[NEW SETTING] Creating debug setting to clear database overhead on scans.
[NEW FILTER] Creating filter so that a programmatic limit can be placed on the Link Scan. (The filter is ‘wpil_fill_link_table_post_limit_break’, and it’s passed a “stop now” boolean (default FALSE) and the number of posts processed in the current batch.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Preventing duplicate Autolink creation from the Bulk Create Autolinks setting!
[IMPROVEMENT] Further validating the “Ignore by CSS Class” setting so that accidentally adding a period to the class name won’t be an issue.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating improved method of storing temporary data to help with caching systems.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding cache busting for when the Settings are saved to avoid lag or not having the Settings update.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Inbound Suggestions to fully use the “Only Process These ACF Fields” setting so that heavy sites can run much more quickly.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the functionality to keep the “Post Modified” date from updating when a link is inserted.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the word inserting to avoid cases where the inserted link is longer than the user selected one.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the “Restrict Autolink to Same Language” systems to avoid wrong language links being inserted when posts are created and updated.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Autolinking to not insert “Same Language Restricted” links if the target post’s language can’t be determined.
[EFFICIENCY] Improving the Autolinking processes when saving a post so they run faster.
[EFFICIENCY] Improving the link extracting code so it runs more quickly.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug in the “Case Sensitive” Autolink check that would cause it to skip over some valid linking locations.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would show the “Case Sensitive” Autolink setting as OFF when it was really ON.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would sometimes keep Domain attributes from applying.
[BUGFIX] Fixing an empty variable notice from the Click Tracking when opening custom post type archives.

2.3.0 September 13, 2023

[NEW SETTING] Creating a setting to allow the use of “Ugly Permalinks” in the Link Whisper Reports! (Some servers find the URL calculating needed to generate all of the Link Whisper “View” links very taxing. (In extreme cases, up to 90% of the Report’s load time is spent just calculating URLs.) This setting allows the reports to use the basic page/term URL instead so that the calculation doesn’t need to be done. The “ugly” permalinks are only used in the Link Whisper “View” links inside the Reports, so it won’t affect links created with the Suggestions or Autolinks, and it won’t change the site’s actual permalinks.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Preventing the processing of user-defined meta fields if doing so will cause an error.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating a “retry” system for the Bulk Autolinking to make the link inserting better able to handle errors while creating links.
[IMPROVEMENT] Further indexing Autolinks so the Autolink Report loads faster!
[IMPROVEMENT] Preventing situations where suggested links run past the end of the suggested sentence panel.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the suggested anchor word calculating to generate more concise anchors.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the suggested word handling so that if repeating target words occur in the sentence, the shortest sentence that contains all the words will be generated.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Link Report’s database queries more efficient to speed up loading.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Rank Math “Pillar Content” checks in the Links Report much faster.
[COMPATIBILITY] Improving the “Same Language” functionality for the Autolinking so it works better with page builders!
[COMPATIBILITY] Improving the Themify integration so it’s more flexible with different data structures.
[COMPATIBILITY] Improving the Suggestion processing so that it works much better on Enfold content and other shortcode-based page builders.
[UX/UI] Creating a list of known shortcodes for easy reference in the Content Ignoring section. (Look for the “!” icon next to the shortcode ignoring field. Some active shortcodes may not be listed due to the many different ways shortcodes can be registered.)
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would count valid links as “Broken” in the Dashboard widget if the Broken Link Scan was running.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug in the Autolinking that would make it skip over keywords in content if they were bordered by “strong” tags.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause “link-less” suggestions.

2.2.9 August 28, 2023

[NEW FEATURE] Adding automatic “Pillar Content” suggestion prioritizing for the Outbound Suggestions! (Now when there are “pillar” posts in the suggestions, Link Whisper will put them at the top of the suggestion list. Works for both Yoast and Rank Math)
[NEW FEATURE] Adding “Pillar Content” icons to the Links Report icon system so pillar content posts can be easily identified.
[IMPROVEMENT] Updating the Themify content handling for sites using the Themify Ultra theme.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the content validation during link inserting to improve the insert rate.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding express image URL check to keep images from counting toward the Max Outbound Link Limit if they are inside a link.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding check to prevent good links from being listed as broken in the Links Report icon system. (If a post was being processed by the broken link checker, the Links Report icon system could pick up on the fact the links were under review and would assume they were broken)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Muffin builder support.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the post “slug” getting for the Outbound Suggestions more robust. (On occasion, the “slug” would just read “/”, and it would look like a link was being suggested for the home page. The actual inserted URL was unaffected, but the display was wrong.)
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would cause the Link Scan to hang in place and sometimes show odd progress numbers.
[BUGFIX] Fixed some bugs in the automatic GSC keyword updater that would keep it from automatically restarting once it’s finished.
[BUGFIX] Fixing minor “beta” notice coming from the licensing system.
[BUGFIX] Fixing “strpos” errors that would cause links not to insert if the sentence text was missing…
[BUGFIX] Fixing minor notice that would happen when unchecking the Autolinking’s Priority Level setting for existing rules.
[BUGFIX] Fixing minor notice that would sometimes occur when refreshing the Autolinking Report.

2.2.8 August 18, 2023

[NEW FEATURE] Creating button to allow Link Scans to be resumed! (Scans can be resumed up to 3 days after interruption)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding the ability to remove duplicate links when running the Bulk Autolink Rule Refresh. (If an autolinking rule is set to only insert once per post, running the bulk refresh will remove duplicate inserts)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the Domain Report’s search function so the link dropdowns will only show links that fit the search parameters.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Rank Math SEO title retrieving so it can work during Suggestion generation.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the Autolinking Rule “Save” functionality so that it will now save the entered priority level setting and any selected category restrictions.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Autolinking’s page builder content scanning faster and more efficient.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Autolinking’s ACF field searching faster and more efficient.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Autolinking table fully sortable by inserted link count!
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause Suggested Sentences to be too long if there were commas & parenthesis in the sentence.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause external-site link attributes to be applied to some relative links.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would make the Links Report use the same SEO title for all posts on the same page.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would make the Inbound Suggestions ignore post titles.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep Inbound Suggestions from using all available Target Keywords when generating suggestions.
[BUGFIX] Fixing issue that would cause category and term descriptions to lose headings and images when autolinks were inserted in them.
[BUGFIX] Fixing minor notice coming from the Click Tracking when opening some term archive pages or blogrolls.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause the “Min Sentence Length” and “Max Sentence Length” settings to sometimes be ignored.

2.2.7 June 20, 2023

[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to control the max length of suggestions!
[NEW SETTING] Adding support for Gutenberg reusable blocks! (The process of scanning can be resource intensive, so we’ve added a setting in the Advanced Settings tab to turn this ON or OFF)
[IMPROVED FEATURE] Adding ability to bulk delete links to the Domains Report! (Now whole domains of links can be easily deleted)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding Autolinking support for posts going from “Scheduled” to “Published” so that links can be added as soon as the posts go live.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the ability to adjust links to insert so that they match the formatting of the page builder/editor they are about to be inserted in.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the post identifying methods used in the Click Tracking so the stats are more accurate.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving click tracking support on term pages.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the ability to determine target post based on its URL so that Inbound and Outbound linking stats are more accurate.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the link inserter’s ability to account for invisible characters.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Autolink process that runs at post update more efficient.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Domain Report’s queries more efficient.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making sure that image “title” and “alt” text isn’t accidentally processed by the suggestions.
[BUGFIX] Fixing some minor PHP notices.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep ACF fields from processing.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep link stats from updating when the URL Changer makes a URL Change.
[BUGFIX] Fixing HTML spillover that could occur from the “Select Possible Links” dropdowns.

2.2.6 May 28, 2023

[IMPROVEMENT] Creating a filter for the license key input so invisible characters or spaces from copy+pastes won’t cause license failures.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Suggestion generator better able to handle sentences that have multiple styling tags. (tags such as “strong”, “b”, “i”)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the “Filter by Category” and “Filter by Tag” settings in the Inbound Suggestion page work on an intersecting basis. Now if you select a Category and a Tag to filter by, all suggestions will be pulled from posts that are in BOTH the selected Category and the Tag. (Same as in the Outbound Suggestions)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Suggestion generation so Target Keywords are used more effectively when searching for suggestions.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving ACF support for the URL Changer!
[IMPROVEMENT] Updating the Broken Link Checker’s credentials to get more accurate link checking results.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the functionality that traces URLs to their posts faster and more efficient.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Autolinking process that runs during post updates run faster and more efficiently.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Autolink tracking so links removed during post updates register sooner.
[EFFICIENCY] Disabling “Back to Report” Report page reloader since it was using a small amount of system resources in the background.
[BUGFIX] Fixing error when ACF is installed, but no ACF fields are available to process.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would make the Links Report unsortable by Post Date if “Show Organic Traffic” was on.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep the “Post Updated” time from updating when an autolink was inserted in the content while saving the post.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause pages to be listed on the Target Keyword page multiple times.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause the Autolinking to consider its job done too early and not insert all of its planned autolinks.

2.2.5 May 5, 2023

[IMPROVEMENT] Setting up word caching for the remaining supported languages! (Should make suggestions run much faster in Arabic, Danish, German, Finnish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovakian, and Serbian)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding support for Custom Permalink changed post URLs. (Now posts that have had their URLs changed with the plugin can be identified)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the text processing methods so the suggestions are overall faster.
[UX/UI] Adding notice for the outbound suggestions that will display when there’s been a processing error.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would make English text process slowly.
[BUGFIX] Fixing a bug that would keep posts with apostrophes in their titles from being listed in suggestions.

2.2.4 May 2, 2023

[CONTENT SUPPORT] Creating support for WP Recipe subfields! The supported fields are “Ingredients”, “Equipment”, and “Instructions”.
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to disable suggestions for “noindex” posts!
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to ignore Elementor modules from linking.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Autolinking to remain within the “Max Inbound Links” limit.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the database collation checking for the Links & Target Keyword Reports. (When the collation is different between database tables, the reports can’t show data unless we account for the difference)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the suggestions so they can process text in an “accent-neutral” manner. (EX: Now “souffle” or “naive” will be able to match with “soufflé” or “naïve”. Very important for GSC keywords as the accents can vary based on user searches.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving Thrive content getting so we’re sure to be pulling the active content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the ACF field query faster and less likely to be killed by WP Engine on sites with a lot of fields.
[IMPROVEMENT] Ignoring links inside of HTML comments when trying to scan the whole page for links.
[IMPROVEMENT] Updating the English language processor so it won’t have processing issues with emojis in post titles.
[EFFICIENCY] Caching autolink insert stats to make bulk updates and post checks faster.
[EFFICIENCY] Streamlining the autolink insertion for Classic & Gutenberg users so that page updates are faster.
[UX/UI] Shortening the changelog in the plugins page.
[UX/UI] Improving the Links Report icon system so the “Hidden by Redirect” notice is more accurate.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would make the “Bulk Refresh Autolink Rules” process cancel early, only after processing a few rules.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would allow hidden “noindex” posts to display in the reports.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep Domain Attributes from being listed or changeable in the Domains report.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug in the autolinking that would allow partial word matching for contractions. (EX: a keyword of “won” could have been matched with “won’t”)

2.2.3 April 14, 2023

[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the metafield link deleting so it’s more efficient and can remove relative links in meta content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Further improving the JSON detection so links aren’t inserted into JSON content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Reworking the Target Keyword data queries so the displayed information is more accurate and searchable.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep Autolinks from inserting in ACF posts with Repearter or Flexible Content areas.
[BUGFIX] Fixing minor notices about Autolink settings not being set.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would allow ignored posts to show up in reports when filtering.

2.2.2 April, 9, 2023

[NEW FEATURE] Creating icon system for the Links Report! (Now broken links will have a “broken” icon, redirected links will have a “redirect” icon + help text to say where the link is pointing)
[NEW SETTING] Creating Longtail Keyword prioritizing setting for the Autolinking! (Just turn it on, and Link Whisper will automatically set longer keywords to a higher priority)
[NEW SETTING] Creating Autolink setting to allow Rules to be restricted by language! (The setting detects the language of the rule’s target URL, and restricts the links to posts in the same language. Works with both WPML & Polylang translations)
[NEW SETTING] Creating Autolink Rule setting to allow limiting how many times an autolink is inserted!
[NEW SETTING] Creating import balancer for the Autolink CSV import so autolinks are only imported as fast as the server can handle.
[IMPROVEMENT] Setting the Broken Link Scan to skip over posts that it’s not able to scan.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the heading detection for Autolinks to avoid inserting links into HTML entity encoded heading tags.
[IMPROVEMENT] Removing posts that are inaccessible due to URL redirects from the CSV exports.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding redirect detection support for SEO Press!
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving backup licensing functionality. (If the primary method can’t reach our server, Link Whisper will try the backup)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the error handling for the functionality that deletes Link Whisper Free when Premium is installed.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the styling tag handling in suggested links to avoid breaking formatting. (Sometimes a “strong” tag would be moved to the wrong spot and this would cause formatting issues)
[IMPROVEMENT] Applying “Skip Sentences” settings to ACF content if a page’s content is entirely made of ACF content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making sure post titles are UTF-8 in the CSV exports
[IMPROVEMENT] Sorting the terms used in the Autolinking’s “Restrict to terms” option by popularity.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the link deletion from the Error Report so it does a better job of deleting links.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding support for multiple GSC profiles! (Profile selector in the settings is now a multi-select)
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the GSC Keyword download stats more accurate during download.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the background broken link detector’s support for page builder content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving URL to Post detection speed. (Particularly helpful during scans)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Error Report’s ability to delete links with “&” inside them.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the post saving speed by making the URL Changer & Link Insertion more efficient.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the JSON detection for the link inserting process. (Inserting links into JSON almost always breaks it, so we don’t want to do that)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving handling for schema blocks.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the post content filtering for Ultimate Gutenberg (now Spectra) blocks so that tags aren’t stripped out when scheduled posts go live.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the page builder content searching for Inbound Suggestions so more suggestions are found.
[IMPROVEMENT] Filtering out keywords smaller than 3 letters in the Inbound Suggestion process unless the keyword is specifically searched for. (Searching for “at” just wastes time in most cases)
[COMPATIBILITY] Fixing compatibility issue with WordPress versions lower than 5.4.1.
[COMPATIBILITY] Improving Autolinking support for sites that have huge numbers of terms.
[COMPATIBILITY] Improving Autolinking support for keywords that have “&” and “‘” characters in them.
[UX/UI] Adjusting Target Keyword helptext positioning when Gutenberg editor is active.
[UX/UI] Adding reminder that newly created Gutenberg posts need to be reloaded once in order to have suggestions generated.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would sometimes cause suggested sentences to be split on “&” characters.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause all posts to be listed in the Orphaned Posts Report if there were no orphaned posts.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would cause the external site loading screen to display during a Link Scan.

2.2.1 March 17, 2023

[NEW LANGUAGE] Adding Ukrainian language support!
[NEW FEATURE] Creating Autolinking Rule Export/Import functionality! (Inside the “Bulk Actions”)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to ignore categories of pages from the Autolinking.
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to ignore categories of posts from the Orphaned Posts report.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Autolinking’s rule refresh systems so they work faster and result in a more accurate link count.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving Polylang support so multiple translated posts using the same “slug” can be accurately identified.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the empty anchor tag deleting. (Enables deleting artifacts like this “” from post content)
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the “Links Found” stat in the Dashboard more accurate.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making sure suggestions for list items only target a single list item. (No stretching links across items)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Thrive integration to handle content issues during link insertion.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving link deletion for HTML-encoded content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving URL changing in Thrive content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating auto-sorting mechanism so high priority autolinks are guaranteed to be inserted first when bulk creating them.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating system to skip posts that can’t be processed during the Link Scan.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the Domain Attribute system’s ability to identify relative links and apply the correct attributes.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the suggestion generation so suggestions can be created for individual HTML table cells.
[COMPATIBILITY] Accounting for collation differences between the “posts” and “terms” database tables. (When the collation didn’t match between the tables, the Links Report couldn’t show posts)
[UX/UI] Fixing styling bug in the row toggles on mobile & making them look nicer.
[UX/UI] Adjusting the Autolink table’s mobile styling so it looks nicer.
[BUGFIX] Preventing duplicate posts from being listed in the Links Report.
[BUGFIX] Fixing dropdown alignment issue on the Autolinking Report when the “Select Links” column was visible.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would break the formatting on some HTML tables.

2.2.0 March 4, 2023

[NEW FEATURE] Adding Support for ACF flexible content fields!
[NEW FEATURE] Creating Bulk Autolink Refreshing. (Selecting Autolinking Rules and triggering the refresh will reactivate the insertion process if there was an error)
[NEW SETTING] Creating new setting to clear cache when links are deleted from a page.
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to trigger the post update action after link deletion. (Backup setting in case the cache clearing doesn’t work.)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the ignore sentence use so that differences in plurality & tense will be accounted for. (EX: the ignore sentence of “best shoes” will work to ignore “best shoe” in suggestions)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the Autolinking’s insertion timing to improve compatibility
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the functionality that determines what post a URL is pointing to so it’s more accurate and can find the post in more cases.
[IMPROVEMENT] Increasing the max allowable size of the Autolink URLs.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the ability to get Polylang translated terms.
[IMPROVEMENT] Ignoring object caching when exporting CSV data. (Cached data can be out of date)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding Gutenberg “Query Loop” blocks to the “Ignore Links From Latest Post Widgets” setting so their dynamic links can be easily ignored.
[COMPATIBILITY] Whitelisting Link Whisper’s WP JSON endpoint with Perfmatters to prevent blocking. (We use the JSON endpoint for authenticating the GSC connection, so if it’s blocked, GSC can’t authenticate)
[COMPATIBILITY] Updating Broken Link Checker’s access credentials to improve responses on checked links.
[UX/UI] Adding glow effect to the Bulk Create Autolink’s option to globally configure the autolink settings so you know when the settings are applied.
[UX/UI] Adding a note to the “Link Stats” columns in the post tables so it’s clear when a post is being ignored in Link Whisper.
[UX/UI] Creating notification for when the Base64 string functions aren’t available. (Link Whisper uses them to safely store and retrieve data)
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep relative links from being deleted.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would continually mark a post as “Links Not Scanned”.

2.1.9 February 13, 2023

[IMPROVEMENT] Improving “Draft” post permalink generation during the Inbound Suggestions so WPML localizes the links to the correct locale for their posts.
[UX/UI] Adding “Post Language Code” stat to the Inbound Suggestion stats if WPML is active.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep the Bulk Autolinking panel from responding to button clicks.

2.1.8 February 11th, 2023

[NEW FEATURE] Creating ability to bulk delete autolinking rules!
[NEW FEATURE] Adding Inbound Suggestion support for category & tag descriptions!
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating additional checks to prevent links from being inserted into JSON content.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the error message that displays when the licensing check fails to connect.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the backup licensing method so it’s more robust.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the suggestion text processing to make suggested links shorter and more focused.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the category & tag link stat updating more efficient and accurate.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding suggestion support for language-specific categories and tags. (Now when generating suggestions, the system will check to see if the suggested terms are in the same language as the post)
[IMPROVEMENT] Adjusting the Target Keyword display areas so they always display the checked GSCX keywords, and will show more than 20 keywords if more than 20 are checked.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating “Bulk Actions” section in the Autolinking report, and moving the “Bulk Create Autolink Rules” button into it.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the ability to find a post based on its URL so that language-specific relative links can be traced. (EX: “/en/testing-page” can now be correctly traced)
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Domain filtering settings “www” insensitive. (Now, "https://www.example.com" and "https://example.com" will be treated as belonging to the same domain when used in the Domain Settings)
[UX/UI] Creating error notice that displays if the Suggestions get stuck during processing.
[UX/UI] Adding “Tested up to” information so you can see the latest version of WordPress Link Whisper is tested on.
[COMPATIBILITY] Fixing PHP string processing errors. (Would tend to occur when saving posts and generating suggestions.)
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would allow single words from Target Keywords to be used in suggestion generation.
[BUGFIX Fixing bug that would keep autolinks that are supposed to be inserted multiple times from inserting.

2.1.7 February 2nd, 2023

[NEW SETTING] Creating option to set the post Link Whisper is processing in a Link Scan as the WordPress global $post. (Helps with processing shortcodes and widgets that rely on the global $post to know what content to display.)
[NEW SETTING] Creating setting to allow users to set a minimum word length for suggestions.
[EDITOR UPGRADE] Improving the Themify builder integration so content can be processed more accurately and links better detected.
[COMPATIBILITY] Adding functionality to whitelist Link Whisper’s Google Seach Console JSON endpoint in Clearfy if Clearfy is active on the site. (We need to whitelist the endpoint to allow authentication and GSC data downloading)
[COMPATIBILITY] Fixing some PHP 5.6 incompatibilities and error messages.
[COMPATIBILITY] Improving the Autolinking’s link accounting when inserting links into page builder content so inserted links are correctly tracked. (Links inserted into content built with some page builders wouldn’t be listed in the Auto-Linking page because the format wasn’t what Link Whisper expected)
[SPEED IMPROVEMENT] Caching Inbound Suggestion target post data to speed up suggestions.
[SPEED IMPROVEMENT] Caching processed sentence text in a number of languages to improve suggestion generation speed. Currently cached languages are English, French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, and Hindi. (More coming soon!)
[IMPROVEMENT] Replacing the “Detailed Export to CSV” file’s “Outbound Link URL” and “Outbound Link Anchor” columns with “Outbound Internal Link URL”, “Outbound Internal Link Anchor” and “Outbound External Link URL”, “Outbound External Link Anchor” columns so it’s easier to tell outbound internal links from outbound external ones.
[IMPROVEMENT] Creating system to handle cases where accented quotes (“ and ”) are used in HTML attributes so links are correctly detected.
[IMPROVEMENT] Updating check to see if post content was built with Elementor.
[IMPROVEMENT] Clearing WordPress data cache after Link Scans so up to date link stats are shown on sites that use aggressive data caching.
[IMPROVEMENT] Clearing the Setting cache when the Link Whisper Settings are saved to avoid any cases where the old cached settings continue to apply after the settings have been updated.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding Inbound Suggestion support for user defined custom fields! Now fields entered in the “Custom Fields to Process” setting field will be searched during the Inbound Suggestion process.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the HTML attribute detection to prevent links from being suggested for text inside attributes. (EX: inside “title” attributes)
[IMPROVEMENT] Ensuring only posts in the same language as the target one are searched for suggestions to improve accuracy and suggestion generation speed.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the frontend script initialization so it will handle lengthy deferrals much better and will fail silently if its initialization data isn’t available.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding support for Custom Post Type specific “ugly” permalinks during the Link Scan.
[UI/UX] Adding large file notice in the Bulk Autolink CSV import mentioning that the import could take a while and that large files sometimes max out the site’s memory. If errors occur, please try splitting the file into smaller pieces.
[BUGFIX] Preventing duplicate categories and tags from being displayed the Autolink’s setting to restrict links to specific terms.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug in the Autolinking’s “Possible Links” display that would make it look like Link Whisper was suggesting a partial-word match.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would allow links to be inserted in self-closing tags like “img” tags if one of their attributes had the same text as a suggestion. (EX: an image’s “alt” tag could have the same text as the image’s caption. Previously, selecting a suggestion for the caption could have seen the link inserted in the alt text.)
[BUGFIX] Fixing wrong data type error when saving Themify post content.

2.1.6 January 7th, 2023

[NEW FEATURE] Creating a new control system for viewing and adding attributes to links from the Domains Report! Now domain-level link attributes can be assigned quickly from the Domains Report.
[NEW SETTING] Creating Domain Settings tab for controlling domain-level link rules.
[NEW SETTING] Creating “dofollow” setting so links can be set to “dofollow”.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the “Point Suggestions From Staging to Live Site” setting inputs better able to handle spaces and inconsistent trailing slashes.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the link attribute adding so it’s faster and more robust.
[IMPROVEMENT] Adding <strong> and <i> HTML tags to the tags that can be ignored from linking.
[IMPROVEMENT] Making the Settings page reload in the last open tab after setting save. (For example, if you were on the “Advanced Settings” tab when you saved, when the page reloads, it will be in the “Advanced Settings” tab)
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving the link deletion so it can handle cases where the link’s actual protocol differs from what’s in the Links Report.
[IMPROVEMENT] Improving Thrive content processing so now WordPress Editor content modified by the Thrive editor can be processed.
[UI/UX] Improving the Target Keyword page’s tooltips so they look nicer and are easier to read.
[UI/UX] Fixing the dropdown styling for Right-To-Left languages.
[UI/UX] Adding subscription-type messages for the Free Trial versions of Link Whisper to the Settings page.
[COMPATIBILITY] Handling cases where caching or JS optimizing plugins change Link Whisper frontend script loading order.
[BUGFIX] Fixing bug that would keep suggested links from being inserted if they ended with a quotation mark.

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