IS IT A VIRUS?: can’t edit-comments, people can’t post comments, also spam

Alex,

Well, your site looks okay. I just tried to leave a comment and got the same message “could not open socket”. I doubt that it’s a virus but something in your setup is trying to connect to something and failing.

Check you error_log file if you can. Also, try the usual: disable all of your plugins and see if that helps. Once you have them all disabled, try leaving a test comment.

If that works, start re-enabling them until you find the culprit.

Good luck.

Thanks for the help.

Where is the error_log file?

If you are running your own server and are on apache then try looking in /var/log/apache2/error_log.

If you are using a hosting service (for some reason I think you are using Awardspace) then contact the your provider and ask for a copy of the error_log.

Ok, so I checked the plugins by turning them all off.

The edit-comments.php file doesn’t work still when even after all plugins are off, but I can post a comment at least.

Unfortunately it is the captcha plugin that is causing trouble with being able to post comments so I need to find a way to filter out spamming robots…

I still cannot access my edit-comments.php

Hmmm… not so sure how helpful awardspace will be since I have a free account. But I’ll try anyway.

Ok so I sent a request in for the error_log file. We’ll see how quickly they respond.

Any other thoughts on what might be the problem?

Someone mentioned that there might be a problem with the .htaccess file, but I don’t really know.

Can I edit the php code myself? I seem to see from google that I can get the error_log via php call.

Bleep. They said they only give error_log file to paying accounts. Hmmm…

Can I edit the php code myself? I seem to see from google that I can get the error_log via php call.

I’ve never tried but you should be able to do it by adding this to your .htaccess file (backup that file before modifying it!)

php_flag log_errors on
php_value error_log /your/blog/home/php-error.log

See if that generates any log data when you try to post a comment.

Bleep. They said they only give error_log file to paying accounts. Hmmm…

Well, that makes sense… I mean, you are getting what you paid for…

If he’s using a free account – he probably is not allowed access to the root by ftp … so no way to edit .htaccess or his php files, I would think.

Just to answer one of your earlier “generic” questions about managing comment spam, please see the Combating_Comment_Spam page in the Codex.

Thanks guys,

I can actually edit my .htaccess file, I am pretty sure since it is in with all of the other files I normally can easily access… I didn’t do it yesterday because I was busy, and didn’t want to try something extensive.

Should I do it? Is it important to get that error_log info?

To be clear, when I turn of the wp-recaptcha plugin I am using people can post comments. But even then when I go to https://www.easylawofattraction.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php (via my account) it acts like I am trying to access a page that isn’t there. So for a while I was getting all this spam, and couldn’t access my account to delete the comments…

I am setting up Akismet now. Getting rid of the old plugin I was using: wp-recaptcha

All the Best, Thank you for the help,
Alex

Hmmm… I was going to put my API key in for aksimet, and it said

The key you entered could not be verified because a connection to akismet.com could not be established. Please check your server configuration.

???

Someone suggested to me that something could be wrong with my .htaccess file and that is why I can’t access edit-comments.php properly. What do you think?

More info:

I also am having the same 404 error trying to access plugin-editor.php …

Sounds like you are running into some bizarre hosting problems. The webserver sending a 404 for something that exists in irrational…

You are running 2.5.1? After you have backed everything, have you tried re-uploading the WordPress files? You can find a copy of 2.5.1 here.

Other than that, the only advice I have is switch to another host.