My Administrator status has changed

Hi Jenn,

That’s strange. Which plugins and theme do you have installed?

Hi mindctrl. Thanks for asking, I have woothemes canvas installed.

To follow up on this issue of suddenly being ‘not the administrator’ any more, if there are any other sources of advice I can seek, I would be most grateful.

I am now also unable to add photos onto my website. I can add them to my media files, but then cannot insert them into my web page.

My best guess to what caused my restrictions is that someone else has accessed my site and made themselves administrator. However, I cannot see any other administrators as I am not one any more.

Do I need to rebuild my site?

I am running on wp4.2.0 with Canvas theme. Plugins are:

Google Analytics and wordpress SEO by Yoast,
TablePress,
Testimonial Basics,
Accordian Shortcodes,
Broken Link Checker (which gives me proof that external source/s is/are adding spam code to external sites),
Event Geek,
Fast Secure Contact Form,
Features (Woothemes),
Images Watermark
Post Duplicator
Projects (woothemes)
Table of Contents Plus
Cleverness To Do Listother woothemes ‘essentials’ – woodojo, woosidebars, woothemes helper

The first thing I would do would be to go to cPanel > phpMyAdmin to look at the database to see whether ‘yourprefix_usermeta’ > ‘_capabilites’ shows ‘a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;b:1;}’ and ‘_user_level’ is ’10’.

How familiar are you with phpMyAdmin? If you are not very familiar, you can ask your webhost to help you with the following:

1. Backup the MySQL database before making any changes – just in case.

2. Log in to phpMyAdmin, click on the database, and then click on wp_users. This will show you if anyone else has hijacked your admin role and if you are still listed as an admin. If you are, then there is another issue at hand.

3. If not, go to the wp_usermeta table. In it, there is a setting for your admin user’s privileges. You’ll find a field that contains something like “a:1:{s:6:”author”;b:1;}”, and you want to change it to be “a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;b:1;}”. (not including the quotes).

Yes, “setting for your admin user’s privileges” = ‘_capabilities’, then also be certain ‘_user_level’ is ’10’.

Jenn,

When you say you can’t insert them into a page, can you explain what happens when you try?

Hi leejosepho, squidpeg9 and mindctrl.

Thank you so much for your info, it is really appreciated.

On investigation, in usermetadata, my “wp_capabilities” is

a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;s:1:”1″;}

which has an ‘s’ where your ‘b’ is.

My user level is 10.

On checking wp-users, there are 3 users including me, all are valid users, and all with “0” status. I can’t see any “admin” statuses. Would this be instead of “0” under user_status, or under another heading?

Regarding not being able to insert images, I select the field where the image is to be inserted, select an image from my media files, “Select”, then it responds by taking me back to the table, but the coding to include the image has not been added. I have changed just text on these tables successfully. I would say that it goes through the motions, but there is no outcome.

I could manually add one or two by typing, but I have a lot of additions, and I am really curious to know whether it is another symptom of a larger issue around my administrator status.

Thanks again, Jenn