This post is for those that use MailChimp RSS campaigns and suddenly notice duplicate Featured Images showing up in them.
After using the Premium version of the Featured Images plugin for some time, we experienced a sudden unexpected problem with duplicate images showing up in the WordPress article excerpts in our weekly MailChimp RSS email template.
As a symptom, we noticed that the plugin had started displaying these notices:
1. Your server is blocking the access to Freemius’ API, which is crucial for Featured Images in RSS for Mailchimp & Other Email synchronization
2. Important Upgrade Notice: Fixed: “Use Only Media Tag Image” option bug removed all body images, now only skips adding featured image to body/rss desc as intended.
We got rid of the plugin warnings in point 1 by “renewing” and re-paying for our already existing, active plugin subscription. That seemed highly unnecessary but it seemed to work.
However that didn’t stop duplicate images from appearing in our email creative. We eventually solved this by updating our long-time MailChimp template to change the merge field FEEDITEM:CONTENT to FEEDITEM:CONTENT_TEXT.
A full log of the issue and solution can be found here:
https://www.evernote.com/l/ABgWKRU3lCdAs6PJ84QdOiKLS8vsyIHds3E