This problem (for me) cropped up shortly after I switched web hosts. For the sake of anomynity, I’ll refer to this host as ObeseBovine. I signed up with the full WP support package, bought a new domain, brought over an old domain, and set about building two WP sites. The first one installed fine. No problems whatsoever. The second one never got far because of the problem we’re discussing.
On what was my second call to ObeseBovine support on this matter, the customer service representative said that he was 99-percent sure that he knew what the problem was and lamented that he did not have access to fix it. So he wrote an exhaustive ticket on the problem (that I never saw) and subitted it to their top tier engineers. These people told me that there was no problem, despite the fact that one of their own had seen it for himself, and depsite the fact that the problem remained static for me using every browser except Explorer, which shall never come near my HD.
The engineers’ solution was to downgrade me a step from Clifford. They told me that it was a browser problem, even though I told them that the problem existed on Firefox (OS X and Windows), Safari (OS X and iOS), Puffin Pro (iOS), and Chrome (Windows). I have a hard time swallowing the idea that those those people not experiencing problems are all using browsers other than these to run their sites.
My solution was to fire ObeseBovine and move to a new host. I have not yet tried to build a site from either of my two installs at the (rhymes with) “NEW”host, but at least I am several intertubes away from the gross incompetence of the tier three ObeseBovine engineers.
The positive for me is that one of the stateside tier two representatives, the one who did not have sufficient permissions to dive deep enough into my install to fix that needed to be fixed, recognized the problem for what it was and was next to 100-percent postive that there was a fix to correct was he said was a faulty install. Unfortunately, he thought that the fix was so simple and obvious that the tier three engineers would have it fixed in five minutes and, consequently, he never explained the issue to me. So, for what it’s worth, that’s what I can offer: I have been told that it’s due to a faulty install.
I wish that I could be of help. The primary reason that I posted here was to draw attention to the issue in the hope that someone from WP reads some of these threads and scours the code for the bug behind this problem.
And speaking of problems, I’d like to mention that the upper level technical support at ObeseBovine is abyssmal. The tech tier one and two people are great. The sales representatives and billing people are great. But the [expletive]s in tier three treated me as if I were some sort of n00b who didn’t know a mouse from a browser. Their automatic default seems to be, “Customer is stupid. Why else would customer need support?” I think that they spend most of their days answering tickets about how to retrieve passwords and assume that everyone they deal with are that ignorant. My point is that my subjective experience with ObeseBovine was almost entirely horrible. I know people who have had good experiences with them, but if you are considering them as a new host, I would be very cautious, do you due (or do-do, in this case) dilligence, and I would manufacture a way to put support through the paces before the thirty-day full-refund period expires. Sorry for the tangent. When I paid through the nose for tech support, I expected tech support, and I don’t consider “the new wordpress is broken and this is a browser issue an we will downgrade your WP from Clifford” to be tech support. There is a fix for this problem, which is evident by the fact that this problem is not ubiquitous. ObeseBovine is basically the physician who, when you tell him (or her) that your arm hurts when you move it like that, says, “Don’t move it like that.”
I don’t know what kind of common denominators we can look for to isolate those of us who are instructed by this issue. All I can tell you is that I was using ObeseBovine and that the one person who acknowledged that there was a problem believed it to be related to the WP install.
