Is my Database Broken? Multiple Instances of Functions, & New Tags Become Posts?

  • Hi there. So I’ve been getting some weird things happening in my WP lately. Here are the symptoms:

    1. I add tags to a post in the post editor and when I go back to the all posts list both tags have become their own individual posts. (Weirdly, I can’t seem to force this to happen, when I try to reproduce the error it doesn’t occur, yet this also happened to with symptom 4, where new tags/categories became membership levels but I could not reproduce this behavior intentionally).

    2. My quick editor was showing two instances of the “Post Type Switcher” function, and today it’s showing FIFTEEN! instances of post type switcher drop down in the quick editor!

    When I first noticed TWO instances of post type switcher in the Quick Editor was after I’d imported a Custom Post Type from another blog and changed it in this blog back to “post”. Not sure if that cause this, maybe by adding an extra table, or column or something to the database? Could that be why entering a tag causes a post to be published under the tag’s name? Wrong column input in the DB? I don’t know.

    3. (not sure if this is related to the duplication in symptom two?) I was using StylePress for my blog page and it would duplicate the list of blog posts about 15 times as well. That was last week. I paid someone to “fix” it. all they did was use a new StylePress Style and some extra CSS to hide things. I’m pretty sure they didn’t find the real source of the problem.

    The first time he fixed it there was an accidental duplication of a nav item drop down arrow on the front end, that’s how I knew he hadn’t found the problem. He said it was happening because my theme wasn’t good enough, so I’ve switched to OceanWP which is supposed to be a very well written theme, but random things in the installation still seem to be duplicating themselves.

    Symptom 4? I have a membership setting with separate taxonomy for membership tags. I’m pretty sure that creating membership tags resulted in accidentally creating many membership levels under those tag’s names — similar to symptom 1, but with the Membership Level (which may be some sort of CPT?).

    Can anyone help me diagnose this and get it fixed? I’m worried there might be something seriously wrong with my database.

    What can be done to figure this out?

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  • I would first run a security sweep to see if you’ve been hacked. (Try Succuri.)

    If your database is fried, there are plugins that will clean it up and optimize it. But I would first download your database into a localhost install to see which plugin will work the best. It may take some testing.

    You do have backups, right?

    Thread Starter SeanBanksBliss

    (@seanbanksbliss)

    I do have backups, but I change the site so often as I build it that I’m extremely reluctant to go back in time; also, I know more about the situation now:

    Discovery: The tags creating their own posts issue is happening because of the Enhanced Category Pages plugin. Deactivate it and this does not occur. Problem: It’s an integral part of my website’s content design. The plugin does not have any settings page and didn’t used to do this. New Question: How can I fix it?

    That also implies (I think?) that the multiple instances of the Post Type Switcher appearing in the Quick Editor are unrelated. Suspicion: This is some how the result of importing Custom Posts from my other site.

    Any ideas for how to proceed?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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