Commerce Plan: Confusing error for "WooCommerce Brands"

[hacchism]

Context and steps to reproduce

WooCommerce Brands has retired already - p9h1Lv-ec4-p2

Due to this, old Commerce plan users now see the error This plugin can no longer be activated because its functionality is now included in WooCommerce. It is recommended to delete it. in the plugin page.

I had a user who tried to delete the plugin but couldn't do so as it was symlinked: 9362338-zen

To prevent confusion, we may want to do either of:

1. Bulk-delete the plugin for our old Commerce plan users (if it causes no issues).
2. Bulk-remove symlink so users can delete the plugin on their own.
3. Hide the message.

Site owner impact

Fewer than 20% of the total website/platform users

Severity

Minor

What other impact(s) does this issue have?

No revenue impact

If a workaround is available, please outline it here.

No response

Platform

Atomic

[github-actions]

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

• 9362338-zen
• 9512760-zen

[supernovia]

📌 REPRODUCTION RESULTS

• This can only be replicated on AT sites with that plugin installed as "managed"

📌 ACTIONS

• Triaged
• Changing priority to normal; we should smooth this out for customers who have been with us for a while

@Automattic/bespin I'm not sure whether you can help with this; if not, can you help us find the correct team?

[cpapazoglou]

Bulk-delete the plugin for our old Commerce plan users (if it causes no issues).

We already did this for almost 19k sites with success. There are some sites that:

• haven't been on woocommerce 9.6 yet
• returned an error

I did run the script again now. Also, you should be able to delete it from wp-cli.

[ash1eygrace]

For posterity, user encountered this error 2 weeks ago in: 9512760-zd-a8c

[gcsecsey]

Bulk-delete the plugin for our old Commerce plan users (if it causes no issues).

We already did this for almost 19k sites with success. There are some sites that:

• haven't been on woocommerce 9.6 yet
• returned an error

I did run the script again now. Also, you should be able to delete it from wp-cli.

For reference, the script mentioned here was added in this PR: 169535-ghe-Automattic/wpcom

[gcsecsey]

For posterity, user encountered this error 2 weeks ago in: 9512760-zd-a8c

We've stopped provisioning woocommerce-brands because it's added to WooCommerce core as of version 9.6. As @cpapazoglou mentioned, we also ran a script that removed the extension from sites with a WooCommerce version >9.6 already installed.

From the Activity log, it seems that this site had WooCommerce 9.6.2 installed when the HE helped to remove the woocommerce-brands extension. This is possible if the site ran a WC version below 9.6 when we stopped provisioning the extension and ran the removal script.

Using the same script, I checked again but found no sites having the extension installed on these WC versions:

• 9.6.2
• 9.6.1
• 9.6.0
• 9.7.0

However, a couple of sites with these WooCommerce versions had the extension still installed:

• 9.7.1 -> 6 sites
• 9.8.0 -> 1 site

I ran the script to remove the extension on these sites. I'm closing this issue now, but please feel free to reopen it, if we encounter similar reports in the future.