Charitable critical error – can’t update/remove plugin

@marco203

Thanks for reaching out! Seems like there is a missing file inside the Charitable plugin for some reason – did you move or copy the plugin from another location? In any case since the plugin is 1.7.0.4 we highly recommend you update to the latest version. We would recommend you deactivate the current version of Charitable and from there update to the latest. One way to do this is by downloading the zip from www.ads-software.com:

https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/charitable.zip

…and preforming a manual update (so you can confirm the latest version is overwriting 1.7.0.4). At the same time you should have no fatal errors involved missing files (which wasn’t something that was an issue in the past oddly enough).

If you don’t know how to uninstall the plugin or if it’s preventing site admin access your host should be able to assist (or we can help as well if you share access, but you should try the host first). Let us know if we can answer any additional questions.

Thanks a lot for the speedy reply.

The manual install worked, and I confirm that I am running the latest version.

However, the problem is still not solved, and the plugin page remains inaccessible.

What way would you recommend to complete (and properly) delete the plugin without having access to the plugin page?

Best,

Mike

@marco203 Thanks for the response.

So this is getting more odd, because if it’s the same error then that file if it was missed should have been added in any new zip install. The only our possibility might be that there is some sort of permissions issue for that file/folder on your server (it’s impossible for us to test this currently, although your host might be able to confirm if you share with them the error).

Regarding deactivating Charitable: It seems like you have admin access. If you don’t and you have FTP access you can simply pull the plugin out of the plugins directory to deactivate it – this effectively deactivates the WordPress plugin and gives you access to your site. This is an online guide that goes into this in detail:

https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-easily-deactivate-wordpress-plugins/#deactivateallpluginsviaftp

If you don’t have FTP access, check with your hosting control panel or your hosting support. If you don’t have much experience with FTP or don’t know a developer who can do this for you, your hosting support should be able to do remove/deactivate the plugin as well.

In any case once Charitable is deactivated you can reach out and privately share access information with us via this form and we can repeat the install and determine if/why this error is still happening and confirm via FTP in your system, but please try the above steps first.

I’m going to go ahead and close this thread for now. But if you’d like us to assist further, please feel welcome to continue the conversation.

Thanks!

Thanks again for the feedback. I deactivated all plugins and that did not solve the issue. Clearly, the Charitable plugin was a source of error, and maybe updating it did solve part of the issue. My guess is that there are probably more issues at play. I’ll let this be for now.

Best,

Mike

@marco203 Agreed that the error message is coming from Charitable but that shouldn’t continue to happen if you did a new updated install. Sadly it’s not something we can troubleshoot well without access (which you can provide to us securely at the previously provided link – don’t ever share access info on these forums).

We don’t like mysteries – and you’re probably correct that there is another issue whose effects were the error message. Feel free to reach out and we can have someone look into this. Have a good rest of the day!