About mashshare.net
mashshare.net is an independent, plugin-neutral handbook about social share buttons, share counts and link previews on WordPress sites.
Why this site exists
This domain hosted the MashShare plugin's store and documentation for about a decade. When the plugin closed in 2025, thousands of links from the WordPress ecosystem still pointed here: to add-on pages, to how-to articles about Facebook tokens and Bitly links, and to explanations of how share counts are calculated. Those links were made because people needed practical answers. This site keeps answering those questions, without selling a plugin.
Independence
mashshare.net is an independent publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the MashShare plugin or its former developers; the name reflects this domain's history. We have no commercial relationship with any plugin, theme or network mentioned in our guides. We do not sell plugins, licences, links or reviews, and we do not run advertising or affiliate links.
Who writes and checks the guides
Guides are written and edited by Hannah Voss, the site's editor, who has spent years maintaining WordPress sites for small publishers and has set up, debugged and removed more share plugins than she would like to count. Each guide is checked against a working WordPress installation and the networks' current public documentation before publication, and it carries the month it was last reviewed.
Her editor profile sets out her background, how she tests a guide before it goes out and what she will not publish.
How we write
- One question per guide, answered in the first paragraph.
- Steps in the order you will meet them, with the reason for each step.
- No invented statistics. Where we compare approaches without measured data, figures are labelled as relative.
- Plugin-neutral: we describe what to look for, and name tools only as examples you should check yourself.
- Plain language, because many readers are site owners, not developers.
How a guide is made
Every guide starts as one question, taken from the search terms and old support threads that still send people to this domain, and a draft that answers it in the first paragraph. The draft is then carried out, step by step, on a working WordPress installation: a current release, a default theme, a page cache and the plugin or code the guide describes. Any step that cannot be reproduced there is rewritten or cut. Settings names, menu labels and option keys are copied from the screen or the source, never from memory.
Claims are checked against a fixed set of sources, which each guide lists at the end: the networks' own developer documentation (or an archived copy of the official page where the live one refuses automated requests, labelled as such), the WordPress developer handbook and function reference, the published standards behind the features (the Open Graph protocol, the accessibility guidelines, the content provenance and photo metadata specifications, the relevant regulations on their official register) and, for detection claims, peer-reviewed studies. Two to four such sources are linked per guide, always to the specific supporting page.
Figures are drawn from the guide's own numbers. A diagram of a workflow shows the steps the guide gives, in the guide's order; a bar chart shows values that appear in the text, and where those values are relative or invented for a worked example, the caption says so. No figure introduces a number the text does not carry.
Corrections follow a one-week rule. A report that a step no longer matches what a reader sees is checked on the test installation within seven days. If it is confirmed, the guide is corrected, the review month is updated, and the reader who reported it is told what changed. If it cannot be reproduced, the reader is asked for their version numbers and the guide gains a note about the difference until it is resolved. Reports about a network's dashboard that changed after the review month are given the same treatment, because those are the most common.
Some things will not be published here. No sponsored content, paid placements, affiliate links or reviews commissioned by a vendor. No plugin recommended as the answer, since the answer depends on a site the editor has not seen. No invented statistics, and no worked example presented as measured data. No claim that a detector, a watermark or a credential proves something it cannot. No content generated by a writing assistant and published without the checks above; every guide is carried out by a person on a real installation before it goes out.
mashshare.net is an independent publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the MashShare plugin or its former developers; the name reflects this domain's history. The site earns nothing from the guides, takes no money from the plugins, networks or tools it mentions, and carries no advertising. Nobody outside the site sees a guide before publication.
How the provenance section fits
The provenance section grew out of the link preview guides. A preview card is the one place where a shared link shows readers who made the content, and the same fetch that builds the card discards most of the signals a publisher tries to attach: embedded image metadata, in-body disclosures, anything that lives below the fold. The section applies the site's usual method to that problem. It describes the signals a publisher controls, the author tags, byline schema, disclosure lines and image credentials, shows how each survives or fails a share, and cites the standards and studies behind each claim.
It is held to a stricter rule than the rest of the site. No detector, watermark or credential is described as reliable, and no tool is described as defeating one, because the cited studies and specifications do not support either claim. The guides give readers the conditions under which a signal holds and leave the judgement to them. The provenance and authorship section opens with a reading order and a statement of what it does not claim.
Corrections
Networks change their APIs and dashboards often, so guides go out of date. If you find a step that no longer matches what you see, please tell us through the contact page with the address of the guide and what you saw. Confirmed corrections are made promptly and the reviewed date is updated.
What we do not do
We cannot provide support for the MashShare plugin, recover licences, process refunds, or answer questions about purchases made from the old store. The MashShare record explains what happened to the plugin and where to go next.
Hannah Voss, Editor. Checks every guide against a working WordPress install and the networks' current documentation. Last reviewed September 2026.
Related reading
- Hannah Voss, editor of mashshare.netWho edits mashshare.net: Hannah Voss's background maintaining WordPress sites, how each guide is tested before publication and what she will not publish.
- Contact the editorHow to contact the mashshare.net editor about corrections, guide suggestions or broken links, and what this independent site cannot help with.
- Privacy policyWhat mashshare.net collects: no accounts or cookies, privacy-first cookieless aggregate analytics from our hosting network, server logs, and your rights.
- Terms of useTerms of use for mashshare.net: how you may use the guides, no warranty, not legal advice, trademarks, links to other sites and the site's independence.
- Byline schema in WordPress: marking up a human authorMark up article authors with schema.org Person data in WordPress: the fields search engines read, author pages, sameAs profiles and common mistakes.
Last reviewed September 2026.