autoload off

Yes this update that was supposed to fix a problem that the previous problem-solving update caused has generated a new problem on our sites, too. Hours and hours of SEO work over months now jeopardised. Why exactly?

We all know BSF has a reputation for dumping stuff on sites that shouldn’t be there/doesn’t work (hidden affiliate issue, sooo many bugs in updates that require even more fixes, “updates” that continually break layout, etc), so we’re now wondering why they’ve issued an update that is flagging sites with an autoload problem. Why the need to autoload all this guff and bloat all of a sudden?

Perhaps they didn’t realise we’re all using WordPress (so we’d see it in the site health check)? No, wait, that can’t be it…

I can confirm that Spectra also added an autoloading row with hundreds of kilobytes to the options table on our site.

One of Spectra’s developers replied in the official Facebook group.

Regarding the auto-loaded database options, they are temporarily necessary to prevent site issues while old code support still exists in Spectra. We are maintaining these options to ensure your website runs smoothly during the transition. After a few more releases, we will notify you in advance and then clean up all the auto-loaded options and old UAGB code support.

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by karlemilnikka. Reason: Spelling

Hi @udarakalana, @jehnlemole,

Sorry for the inconvenience caused to you.

This is a know scenario and we have task regarding this scenario in our tasks list. We will release an updated version of the plugin with the improved option as soon as it is done.

Have a nice day!

Thanks for the info from the BSF FB page.

To BSF: Too little, too late. We’re out.

“After a few more releases…” What? Is that a plan? What are we supposed to do in the meantime? You marked this issue “resolved”? Seriously?

We’re not prepared to wait and see if this drags down our page times and Google punishes us across ads, merchant listings, page rank, etc. We’re not interested in waiting to see if/when this ever gets sorted out or what we have to do to apply whatever “fix” comes. Very not interested in waiting to see what stunt BSF will pull next.

Pages do not “run smoothly” in any case, so that’s not a decent excuse. I have to (or used to have to) check our sites daily because Spectra randomly deletes content, monkeys with layout, switches features on and off and deletes images across sites like an ill-behaved toddler.

In case it helps anyone, I am rebuilding our sites with Kadence. It’s great. Producing beautiful pages, and with much less faffing about than Spectra as a bonus.  

This isn’t an “inconvenience”. It is another in a long series of BSF demonstrating quite plainly that they don’t care a whit about the impacts of their experiments on users. So we’re out.

What we need now from BSF is comprehensive instructions for how to delete Spectra and all the hidden gunk completely from our site. Urgently, please, so we can “resolve” this.

@jehnlemole, Spectra was unfortunately not written with uninstallation in mind. The developers has yet to implement the clean-up that should be triggered by the uninstall hook.

You must clean up the remainders manually. See Clean-up after uninstalling Spectra.

Hey! Guess what. In the process of rebuilding sites to get away from Spectra, Google did indeed detect that our sites are now slower (see above), especially on mobile. Great! Thanks BSF! Awesome result for e-commerce.

In light of the deafening silence from BSF with regard to a fix for all the autoload stuff they dumped on us now causing this problem (it’s been over a month now we’ve waited), we sorted it ourselves.

In case it helps anyone, this is what we did (yes there is a fair amount of work, but there’s no other way to really get rid of Spectra):

1. Backup backup backup EVERYTHING (and/or use a staging site if that’s your thing)
2. Install and activate Kadence blocks plugin (see https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/kadence-blocks/) (of course there are other options, this suited our sites and it a pleasure to use), do NOT disable Spectra (yet).
3. Rebuild pages replacing Spectra blocks/etc with Kadence, deleting Spectra blocks as you go. A good deal of this can be cut-and-paste from Spectra to Kadence, but occasionally things don’t play nicely and you just have to rebuild the block
4. Purge cache and check live site to ensure front end is still working
5. Disable Spectra, purge cache and recheck everything is still working front end

Breathe.

Then to clean up the database mess:

1. Backup everything
2. Delete Spectra (yay!)
3. We installed WP-optimize at this stage to check in on the database and reoptimise all the images, etc. Nice plugin.
4. At this point your site should be working, reasonably clean on optimisation and Spectra deleted BUT because the developers have not sorted out a proper deletion function, you will almost certainly still have a bunch of Spectra gunk in your database. The biggest problem here is the autoload stuff, which can, and does, slow things down. This is not so easy to address, as many plugins like WP-Optimize will show you the table itself, but not the contents.
5. Install and activate AAA Option Optimizer plugin (see https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/aaa-option-optimizer/). Look at settings page, which is a very helpful chart of all the stuff in the options table of your database. This is a sweet little plugin and I’m glad we found it.
6. Because we are ultra cautious, we disabled the autoload on all the stuff from Spectra (see https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/clean-up-after-uninstalling-spectra/ for info from BSF on prefixes to look for, although “often have” in their response isn’t exactly comforting).
7. Purge cache and check all front-end is working.
8. To be ultra safe, leave a few days to make sure everything is working for customers before deleting those now disabled Spectra bits on the options table.

Next step – get rid of Astra.

It takes a lot to make us this cross. Cue empty apologies from BSF…

Thanks for the detailed post, @jehnlemole.

We’re in the middle of migrating away from Spectra as well, but mainly for stability reasons. We’re going with GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks instead of Kadance due to GenerateBlocks’ amazing Global Styles feature.

I just wanted to add a link to the Find My Blocks plugin. It is very helpful when trying to find the last pages with Spectra blocks.

Hi @mohsinbsf. Since it has been two months, I wonder if you have a status update for us. Is there now an ETA for when it will be fixed?

Thanks for taking your time answering our questions here in the forums.

Hi @karlemilnikka ,

I’m Abhijit, from Spectra development team.

Thank you for following up, and we appreciate your patience.

I wanted to provide an update on the autoload issue. In version 2.15.2, we made updates to the GT library, which resolved most of the autoload problems. Additionally, autoload entries from pages and kits are now automatically removed once they’re no longer needed.

While a recent audit found that the issue still exists with block patterns, the problem related to kits and pages has been resolved. We’ll be including a cleanup fix for the remaining ast_block_templates_data-XX entries in the Spectra release after the next version (2.16.0).

In the meantime, you can safely delete any options in your database that start with ast_block_templates_data-.

Thank you again for your understanding, and we’re committed to fully resolving this issue as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Abhijit Nage

@abhijitnage Thank you very much for your detailed answer.

@abhijitnage Today’s release of 2.16.0 did not resolve the issue.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by karlemilnikka.

Hi @karlemilnikka ,

Thank you for following up, and I truly appreciate your patience throughout this process.

My apologies if my phrasing was incorrect. I would like to clarify on what I meant when I said that we will release it in the Spectra release after the next version (2.16.0).

At that time, we had frozen the 2.16.0 package for release while we were working on resolving the auto-cleanup issue in the library. What I meant to say was that we will release it after the 2.16.0 release.

That being said, I’d like to inform you that we have now addressed the cleanup, and it has been included as part of today’s 2.16.1 hotfix release.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any further questions, and thank you again for your understanding.

Best regards,

Abhijit Nage

Hi. Thanks.

Sorry. I misunderstood the version the fix was supposed to be included in. Thanks for taking your time to respond.

The 2.16.1 update didn’t solve the issue for me. ast-block-templates-spectra-common-styles is still autoloaded and over 250 kB in size. I’ve tried regenerating assets but it didn’t make a difference.

Please provide detailed instructions as to how to get the unwanted files off the databases of users who are no longer using Spectra.

EG – Do we have to reinstall, update then delete again?

Whatever these files are, they are still on our database despite our deleting Spectra, so we would like to know what you propose to get them cleared off.