404 Error on /webmentions/receive/

Developer help
1

If you’re looking for help, please provide information about your environment. If you delete this template and don’t provide any information, your topic will be automatically closed.

If you aren’t running the latest version of Ghost, the first thing we’ll ask you to do is update to the latest version of Ghost.

  • What’s your URL? This is the easiest way for others to help you
    https://stout-bowman-associates-llc.ghost.io/
  • What version of Ghost are you using? If it’s not the latest, please update Ghost first before opening your topic
    Hosted by Ghost(Pro)

I subscribe to a website checking service, and they have been reporting the following 404 error:

https://stout-bowman-associates-llc.ghost.io/webmentions/receive/

From searching the forum, this appears to be related to the new announcements feature, which I have not tried to implement for our site. I am assuming there is some code being inserted into my site to support this feature, but I have not done anything in the settings for this site for years. While it does not seem to affect my site in any way, I would like to avoid the notifications I regularly receive that I have a broken link for my site and then check the report only to find it is this every time.

2

As you say, these likely do not indicate a real-world problem.

Based on this comment from August, webmentions may be partially implemented which is why you are seeing this error.

3

OK, so how do I remove the link? Theoretically, broken links can affect a site’s Google ranking. I need to have the site checked for broken links because virtually all the posts have a link to an article somewhere else, and I waste time accessing the report only to discover that it is, once again, this webmentions link. Should I submit a bug report?

4

It seems that a reference to the URL appears in ghost_head. You could re-create a template so that it contains all the other thing that ghost_head does except this mention

BUT

I’ve read some related source code in Ghost and the spec for webmentions and it appears that Ghost has implemented the spec correctly. Ghost is including a structure like this in the header:

`<link href="${webmentionUrl.href}" rel="webmention">`

The spec appears to say that only POST requests should be sent to this URL, but it appears that your link check is following the URL and sending a GET request to it, which Ghost doesn’t need to support.

If I’m reading things correctly, this is a bug in how the link checker handles linked to webmentions specifically.