"Please Try Again" error

If there are no answers beyond “it could be a plugin, a theme, or anything else” I’m not going to do anything except not trust WordPress to save properly now.

And, have you tried with all plugins disabled and the theme switched to Twenty Fifteen (theme functions can interfere like plugins)?

We ask this, because if the issue can be pin-pointed to a specific plugin or theme, then it’s up to that specific plugin or theme developer to fix it.

There are 36,421 plugins at https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/ and 1,712 themes at https://www.ads-software.com/themes/

It is not the responsibility of the handful of volunteers who develop WordPress to ensure that it operates problem-free with almost 40,000 plugins/themes. Rather, it is the responsibility of the plugin/theme developers to ensure that their 1 plugin/theme works with WordPress.

So, if we can actually rule-out a plugin/theme issue, then *maybe* we have a problem with core WordPress. I really doubt it’s a core issue, because I don’t see this mentioned all that often, it’s usually a plugin doing it, and I personally have never encountered it in 10 years of blogging with WordPress.

So, before we continue, please try deactivating all plugins. If that resolves the issue, reactivate each one individually until you find the cause.

If that does not resolve the issue, try switching to the Twenty Fifteen theme to rule-out a theme-specific issue (theme functions can interfere like plugins).

Sorry for the snarky tone yesterday. I was pretty aggravated.

This happens to me about once a month. My plugins are kept to a minimum on this site and the theme has been pretty solid for us since installing it a year ago.

It is impossible for me to go through the processes above. This is a live work site and the owner will not pay for or provide resources for a dev site. That’s another level of aggravation altogether.

I get believing this to not be a core issue. But, to be fair, that’s the same thing everyone gets when they call any customer service line. “It’s not us…it’s _____.” In the end, whether or not it is doesn’t really matter to me, or to the thousands of other people who have experienced this. We’d just like it not to happen.

With that many plugins (and I’m building one myself) and so many million sites, it would seem likely that it’s not just one or ten plugins causing this, unless it were one of the very few used by several million people across genres (SEO/Caching/etc). That leads me to believe that there might be many, many plugins causing this issue, which might mean authors need a better understanding of how something works. Obviously the same is true for themes.

I cannot speak to other’s experiences with this error, but as I get it occasionally, while having a pretty limited list of things I do here…write/add media/that’s about it…I’d be hard pressed to duplicate the issue on purpose. It just happens once in a while. Always while updating a page or post, that much is true, but not with any sort of pattern (I’m a guy who notices patterns). In this particular instance I was in WP all day long with no issues and then…

Perhaps I just don’t understand the process well enough (I’m sure I don’t) but isn’t there some way to hold that post data during the submission process and give an error in a way that keeps it? Maybe like a form that doesn’t submit so you hit Back and the fields are all still populated? It just seems that there can be a more elegant method of the process that might help mitigate this for everyone.

Just ball-parking on this one, and I’ve never encountered it myself, but is it possible that the post_max_size directive set in php.ini (either server side, or per-site) has been set unusually low for some reason – have you also encountered any error issues with media uploads? Or, could there be some setting in mod_security (if you’re using it) that could be limiting the post body size? I know you don’t believe there’s any type of pattern present, but can you think of any common denominators with the posts where the symptom occurs? Post type, specific post content (any particular type of media embeds, or shortcodes) or does it truly seem totally random and unrelated to the post content or size itself?

..like I said, just throwing out ideas, good or bad.

[edit] also, is there anything helpful in the error logs?

It is impossible for me to go through the processes above. This is a live work site and the owner will not pay for or provide resources for a dev site.

To be honest, if you are unable to do this 5-minute necessary troubleshooting process, so we know where to start looking rather than just shooting in the dark, there isn’t much more I can offer.

Perhaps I just don’t understand the process well enough (I’m sure I don’t) but isn’t there some way to hold that post data during the submission process and give an error in a way that keeps it?

WordPress actually does that, it saves to your local browser storage. As many have said before, something not-WordPress is interfering with that and tossing out the error, probably a plugin or theme function.

My only guess going forward is what Clayton offered, that post_max_size is unusually low, but even then WordPress should be saving to your local browser storage. If you took the 5 minutes to rule-out a plugin or theme conflict, we’d have a better idea if that were the case.

James,

How is this a 5 minute troubleshooting process? I cannot duplicate the problem on demand. It happens sporadically…very sporadically. I have no idea what conditions to set in order to make it reoccur. And as our site is visited globally by engineers who are looking for million dollar laser manufacturing systems, I can’ just decide to pull it down overnight when India, China, and a dozen other manufacturing rich countries are looking at us.

If I knew what to do to reproduce it, then I’d be able to run through the plugins fairly quickly. Alas, I don’t know how.

As for the max_size thing, I’ll ask WebSynthesis what the setting is, but the post I was saving yesterday was maybe 500 words. I doubt that would break that limit.

If you have an idea how to make this a 5 minute exercise, I’m all ears.

How is this a 5 minute troubleshooting process?

Deactivate all plugins, switch theme, if the problem doesn’t come back, reactivate each one individually until the problem re-appears.

I cannot duplicate the problem on demand. It happens sporadically…very sporadically.

Sorry, I didn’t know that, but at least that means it’s definitely not a WordPress problem. ??

Sounds more like a server configuration or temporary server hiccup (load on the server at the time perhaps), but if it’s sporadic then it’s definitely not post_max_size either.

If you have access to your server error log, the next time the error happens, note the date and time, then immediately check your server error log for any errors that occurred during that time period. If you don’t have access to your server error log, ask your hosting provider to look for you.

I never had this issue until I upgraded to 4.1.1 from 3.x last week. Perhaps it is due to a plugin or theme that isn’t up to date with 4.x line, but I have reason to think that’s not the case.

In the span of less than 20 hours I hit the problem twice. The first time was after a long stretch of working on a multi-thousand word post and saving drafts regularly without issue, when I saved the last time (when I was ready to preview) I got the error. I hit ‘Please try again’ and promptly got a note in the reloaded post.php page that the backup was newer than the draft (or something to that effect) and offered me to restore. I could see that everything since the last time I hit save draft was gone from the body (although auto-save was working and I was keeping an eye on it all the time). Restored and don’t think I lost anything.

Today I came back to find that my session had expired. I had left WP on a New Post page, which I hadn’t typed anything in (not even a title). It was late when I finished yesterday and even though I wanted to start typing some notes for the new topic, I retired. I punched in my creds and logged in again. I gave the page a title and immediately went to work typing a few hundred words within 10-20 minutes when I felt I had to save draft before continuing. Once I hit save draft, I noticed that the page had no URL! A clear sign of a problem. Before I knew it, I had that infamous page again. Nothing I did could retrieve even a single word from that post. Nothing was saved.

I went back to the Posts page and didn’t find it there either. Upon hitting New Post and typing a title, I immediately saw it waved and a URL generated.

This leads me to think it’s an issue with the draft getting saved in the browser’s local storage and WP failing to warn the user that drafts are not saved. This could be due to expired cookies (the only common thing between the two cases is that the pages had been open for a long time).

At any rate, I think WP can, and has a responsibility, to warn the user when auto-saving drafts doesn’t work. A note at the top of the page or a pop-up should be enough so users at least copy-paste their text elsewhere before trying to save or publish. To me the fact that at least in the case of the new post WP failed to auto-save it even a single time but did’t warn me is already a problem. There is no reason to wait until the user takes some action and surprise them with an incomprehensible page and lost productivity.

I’m more than appreciative of the efforts of volunteers and WP community, and this is meant as a possible help to improve it, not a criticism as-such.

Let me know if I can provide more info.
Thanks.