Links not saving in editor – visual or text

  • I have a problem I’ve never seen before… It just seems odd!!

    I have a client’s site that has been working fine for years. About a week ago my client said that she could no longer enter a link on a page and have it save.
    She can put the link in using the link button, the “Advanced” of the image editor or even manually in the text editor. The link shows in the Page Preview but once the page is saved or updated, the link disappears.

    It acts the same if you put in an image and link it to the image or the attachment page. The image is fine… But no link!

    What seems very odd to me is that after saving, the a tags are there, surrounding the content. i.e.
    <a>text-here</a>
    But no link info.

    It’s not the proverbial missing link caching problem… I’ve checked that out seven ways from Sunday!

    Anyone have any clue as to what’s going on?

    Thanks!

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

  • Did any new plugins get added or updated? Are existing links showing?
    Are there any other symptoms that might indicate a hack?
    Did the user role change?

    Thread Starter kendawes

    (@kendawes)

    Oh, it gets even stranger!!

    First… No, there are no signs of hacking. I un-hack sites for new clients on a regular basis, and this one shows no signs…

    I was delving into the problem further and found that if you look at a page (or post – using the Editor Text tab) that has been previously published , you can see the same missing link problem. However, if you go to that page on the front end of the site… The link is there!!! How’s that for a head scratcher???!!!

    But if you go further back to older posts, at some point the links are there – front and back ends!

    The weirdness of this problem led me down the path to the general case of when WordPress starts to not save properly. Most frequently, it seems that saving Menus when you have a lot of Menu Items can be problematic.

    Here’s a good article explaining the problem…
    https://metabox.io/wordpress-custom-fields-not-saving-increase-max-input-vars/

    Basically, if you have a site with a lot of pages, forms, custom fields, etc., you can run into a problem of having the standard PHP setting (and/or suhosin setting) for max_input_vars being inadequate. The default setting is 1000 and needs to be pushed up to 3000, 5000 or even more!!!

    From a few reports I’ve read, once you run into the max_input_vars problem, not only the pages you have been trying to save are screwed up, the problem can propagate backwards to earlier posts that did not originally have the problem! How’s that for fun?!!

    The site I’m working on has many pages, many forms, many fields… It’s a poster child for a site that can run into this problem.

    Fortunately, I keep my clients’ sites well backed up!

    I plan to see if changing the max_input_vars setting and restoring a backup from around 2 weeks ago cures the problem when I work on the site tomorrow.

    I’ll let you know! This information needs to be more widely disseminated and known for folks with large WordPress sites!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Links not saving in editor – visual or text’ is closed to new replies.