Debugging LinkedIn Articles

Recently, one of my articles was not visible to anyone other than me, and I couldn't figure out why. In order to share it, I posted it on Medium with no problem. Nevertheless, I still wanted to figure out why the article supposedly posted but no one could see it. The worst part of it: the article supposedly posted correctly with no reported issues. Why can no one access my article then?

Support

Once I had a few people confirm that they could not access my article, I sent a message to the support team. I received a few troubleshooting instructions, including signing out of LinkedIn, waiting about 15 minutes, then signing back in; clearing my cache and cookies, flushing my DNS, and trying a different browser. None of these things solved my issue.

Reposting

Next I tried reposting the same blog post by editing it then publishing it again. Still nothing. Copy the contents into a new article. Still nothing. In fact, I ended up making three different articles with the same content with slight variations to see if I can trick the new article to post publicly. Still not working.

Support suggested checking if there are any characters that could be a potential problem by searching on Notepad. I could not find anything.

Debugging

Since nothing was working, I approached this with a problem solving mentality. I was able to post a test article with the gif image and some dummy text to make sure I could in fact post public articles, and it worked! Great, so I knew that this is not the issue.

Ok, so maybe there was some combination of characters in words that is triggering some sort of content filter which is preventing my article from posting. I started a new article (#4) with only the gif image on top, the title, and the introductory paragraph. Then I published it. There were no errors or issues with publishing. I can see it when I am signed into my account. I then tested to see if I can see it when I am in a different browser and not signed in rather than signing in and out within the same browser. It worked!

Now that I knew that I can post the article with this information, I started adding one paragraph at a time the rest of the original article then re-publishing it. For the most part, I did not have any issues.

There were a few times when I got a message that there was a problem publishing the article. However, this was barely visible underneath the pop-up window to confirm that you are ready to publish the post. To resolve this, I discovered that I could just open the article in a new tab and hit edit again.

Finally, I discovered the issue! I could no longer see the article once I tried to publish a specific paragraph and code block. First, I took out the code block and attempted to see the article again. Magically, it was public again. Ok, weird. Add the code block again, either 404: page can't be found.

That's when I realized there was something going on with the code block. After taking out and re-adding different parts, I finally narrowed it down to the line. It turns out, if you start a line with "..." and follow it with some sort of string with either quotation marks (single or double), it will not post. Below are the offending lines.

Take aways

If you want to be sure that your article posted, check if the link works in a window of another browser or in "private" or "incognito" mode. For example, if you use Chrome, check if you can access the article in a Firefox window (while you are not logged in.) According to one of the support pages I received, Chrome and Firefox are the two browsers that work best with Linkedin.

If you cannot see the article, then either your account is out of sync or there is something in your article that is not allowing it to post correctly. There is no indication that this happens unless you check it. 

Before attempting to republish your article, it is good clear your cookies and cache to make sure that isn't the problem. (Keep in mind, this will cause you to get signed out of everything.) If it still does not publish, figure out the best way to divide your article into smaller pieces so you can narrow down exactly what is preventing your article from publishing.