This week, the Matador Jobs team has been monitoring two things of note to our users, and we wanted to drop a quick update on each. First, we are monitoring an influx of notifications of Bullhorn disconnections that Matador’s automated reconnection routine has been unable to recover from and we are also monitoring Matador’s compatibility with WordPress 6.3.

Recent Bullhorn Disconnections: Acknowledgement & Mitigations

We’ve seen a number of reports of Bullhorn disconnections in the past several weeks that Matador seems to be struggling to automatically recover from.

By design, Matador Jobs will attempt to recover from a disconnection, but some disconnections are harder to recover from than others and you’ll occasionally need to intervene. Also, given that Matador attempts to connect to Bullhorn once per ten minutes, and emails administrators when it is unable to reconnect to Bullhorn after three attempts, prolonged downtime that would otherwise be recoverable may still trigger an email notice of connection issues.

We are monitoring these Bullhorn disconnections and we have two notes to share:

  • On July 10 & July 12, Bullhorn updated how API login systems operated. This was sent to Bullhorn admins via email twice in June. The email said the changes shouldn’t affect existing systems, but that systems should optimize for them. Matador Jobs was updated on July 19, 2023 with version 3.8.10 to address these changes. While our code was designed to minimize impacts of the Bullhorn change and require no user action, we worry that our advice was wrong, and we encourage everyone to deauthorize and reauthorize your site after a 3.8.10 (or later) update from 3.8.9 or below.
  • The Bullhorn status page has multiple reports in the last several weeks of planned maintenance and/or downtimes (more than usual, in our opinion) that impacted login or cause latency. These could result in disconnections when they are occurring for more than about 30 minutes. We should be able to recover from these, but perhaps the changes mentioned above, coupled with a downtime on a cluster, is the reason automatic recovery is failing?

Given the number of reports of issues, we are conducting a full review of automatic reconnection to seek improvements to our systems, as we are aware connection quality is critical to your business.

  • UPDATE, Friday August 11: Our review identified a potential cause, at least, impacting our automatic reconnection routine failing to reconnect. Infrequently, the API call that handles the automatic reconnection routine does not complete its loop and ends on a login screen. Previously, an incomplete loop ending on a Bullhorn login screen is the result of bad credential or user actions required, and our automatic reconnection routine “reads” the login screen for errors and stops automatic reconnection. That said, since no errors are occurring and the loop is infrequently ending at the login screen for no known reason, Matador can be allowed to continue reattempting reconnection. A 3.8.13 release candidate is being tested that only stops automatic reconnection when we explicitly find the error messages. This will not reconnect Matador, but it will give it a chance to reconnect on the next sync in 10 minutes.

While we do this, we also will ask you, our users, to continue to request Bullhorn consider deploying the more secure, easier to use OAuth 2.0 JWT Bearer flow as an alternative API authentication flow. This will wholly eliminate most of our automatic reconnection routines as each login is a new authentication that does not require a user (real or simulated) interaction.

WordPress 6.3 Released

On August 8, 2023, the WordPress team released WordPress 6.3. We have reviewed WordPress 6.3 and determined that Matador is fully compatible with WordPress 6.3. Further, WordPress 6.3 is the first version of WordPress to drop support for PHP 5.6, the last supported version of PHP 5.x.

PHP Version 8.3 Betas

Later this year, PHP version 8.3 will release, and its Beta 2 is out for pre-release and testing right now. The PHP 8.3 changes are largely minor and more or less preemptive deprecations for PHP 9.0 in the future. Therefore, we anticipate no issues using Matador in PHP 8.3 compared to PHP 8.2 or earlier.

Matador runs without issue in PHP 8.2 but some deprecations made in PHP 8.2 are not yet handled in Matador as of the 3.8.x release line. This means those who display errors to their screen or review server or WordPress debug logs may see PHP Notices on 8.2 and 8.3. This does not mean Matador fails to run, only that Matador can trigger some notices. We anticipate addressing all those deprecation notices with updated handling and full PHP 8.2 and 8.3 support with the release of Matador Jobs 3.9.0.