Plugin breaking widgets.php (Appearance > Widgets) page

Hi, thanks for reaching out.

Is there anything useful in red text in the console when the error occurs? https://www.ads-software.com/support/article/using-your-browser-to-diagnose-javascript-errors/#step-3-diagnosis.

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found)

Just this.

PS: Yes, widgets.php exists in /wp-content/

Thanks. It’s possible that the page is being blocked by a security module such as ModSecurity. If possible, try reaching out to your hosts, provide the full admin URL being blocked and ask if they can check their logs to see if the page is being blocked. That might be a place to start the investigation.

I have been getting the same issue. Rolling back to v 1.50.1 seems to solve it.

Hi, thanks for getting in touch. I’ve replied at the below link: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/1-50-1-not-compatible-with-old-widgets-screen/. Cheers.

In my case it was a ModSecurity problem. Contacted the hosting company and they diagnosed and fixed it.

Thanks, diegora. Really appreciate your feedback.

I should have phrased it better tbh. It wasn’t a ModSecurity “problem”, ModSecurity was blocking it for security reasons. Since it doesn’t seem like it’s happening only to me, that should probably be looked into, a widget shouldn’t be auto-blocked by ModSecurity. Thanks.

Thanks for the additional feedback. I’ve asked Alex from SiteOrigin to reply. He’ll pass on what we know about the issue and the steps taken to date.

Hi,

Mod_Security is an application firewall. Data is passed through the firewall and the firewall does some checks on everything passed through using a set of rules and it checks for any potential issues. These rules can be quite specific but some of them can be quite general and that’s where false positives can occur. A false positive is something being flagged incorrectly due to an issue with the rule, not the flagged data.

These rules aren’t perfect and mistakes happen. For example, a few years ago we had some reports of pages being blocked for a few people. The cause? The users had added emojis to the page and a rule was incorrectly flagging them. We were able to resolve that issue by getting the rule corrected.

Please reach out to your hosting provider asking them for more information about the block. This will allow us to investigate this issue further. Most hosting providers use an off the shelf solution for rules (which is ideal for a number of reasons) so they should hopefully be able to provide us with a rule id.

Kind regards,
Alex