“Site Health Issues” Alert

Hi boardboss,

I saw the image, but I couldn’t find any information to comment on. You mentioned in another thread that you intended to deactivate our plugin but couldn’t. As I responded, deactivation and deletion of plugins are managed directly by WordPress, and we cannot interfere with that process. In fact, we do not interfere with it. But nevertheless, we provided instructions on how you can do it using FTP.

I suggest that you perform a checkup on your server because something unusual seems to be happening, but it is not caused by our plugin, which no longer exists there.

Cheers,

Bill

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by Bill Minozzi.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by Bill Minozzi.

To be clear, I spun up a new server running PHP 8.2.10, did a “clean” automated WordPress install, which is just WordPress, Akismet, and Hello Dolly. Akismet had an update, but I did not update it. I cannot fathom what you might think is wrong with that server; however, I cannot think of anything to check.

The site health notification came immediately after installing your plugin. I then deleted Akismet and Hello Dolly, since they were unpublished, yet the site health issues notification remained. What triggers that? Clearly the plugin ‘thinks’ something is wrong, even though WordPress indicates the site health is good.

I later installed Elementor, then Elementor Pro, and also the caching plugin Breeze trying to replicate the problem I reported in another ticket about not being able to edit with Elementor. I also added the theme Astra, but removed it and left only Twenty Twenty-Three in place since the editing with Elementor issue occurs with it as well.

Currently, the site has only that theme, Breeze, Elementor and your plugin installed. After deleting your plugin, this remains in the wp_options table: https://prnt.sc/giwaNcgF6mPw. WordPress does indeed handle the removal process; however, WordPress has to be told what to remove.

I thought I understood enough about install/uninstall, although I wanted to be sure. I reached out independently to two different developers who have created several plugins for me in the past. Both told me almost exactly the same thing.

In the simplest possible terms, the plugin has code in its installation section that tells WordPress which database tables to create, etc. When uninstalling the plugin, the plugin must tell WordPress which tables to drop, and other specific data to delete from the database. Otherwise, WordPress would not ‘know’ how to delete the plugin.

To confirm this, I edited the file uninstall.php in your plugin package, then reinstalled the plugin. This time, when I deleted your plugin, the value value for “recaptcha_for_all_settings_china” was deleted from the database because I added “$wptools_option_name[] = ‘recaptcha_for_all_settings_china’;” to the file uninstall.php.

As I mentioned in my other ticket, your plugin DOES NOT completely uninstall itself from WordPress. Some plugins offer an option to remove all traces; however, yours does not.

Since this domain name expires soon, and the server will also go away shortly, I would be happy to give you the WordPress admin credentials so you can investigate this issue, if I have a way to get them to you privately. Let me know if you want me to do that.

Hi,

Thank you for letting me know. I have just uploaded version 1.35, which, when deactivated, removes “recaptcha_for_all_settings_china” from the options database.

Just install and delete and will work.

I want to emphasize that the absence of this did not prevent the removal of the plugin itself from your server.

Cheers,

Bill

Allow me to clarify. Your uninstallation process DOES remove the plugin folder and files created during installation. That said, the process DOES NOT remove the entries created in the wp_options table by your plugin during uninstallation.

I can confirm the version 1.35 plugin you released earlier today removes the entry for “recaptcha_for_all_settings_china”. Thanks for that fix. Unfortunately, there are several other entries that remain in the wp_options table after installation.

Neither WordPress of a cleaner I tried seemed to recognize these entries as being orphaned or otherwise no longer needed, and completely ignored the entries during the cleaning process.

I would suggest you add the other values to the uninstallation process so that when users uninstall your plugin, everything it created is removed from the database. I have the skills to remove these entries manually. Many users would not. Thank you.

Hi Boardboss,

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I’ve done an exhaustive code review, both manually and with the help of a Linux script, and added all the options that were created to be removed from the database. I believe it’s complete now. The version number is 1.36.

Cheers,

Bill

Greetings Bill,

I reviewed your recently updated plugin file uninstall.php, and it appears you have now included all of the items shown in the screenshot I previously attached to this thread. Thanks for that.

Were you ever able to determine what was causing the site health issues flag to be triggered? It never seems to go away, even though WordPress indicated the site health was good and found no errors.

Best regards,
BB

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by boardboss.

Hi BoardBoss,

I’m glad to hear that.

Our plugins are limited to reading the error log file (a file in the PHP language – the core language used to build WordPress) and, if they find records that are two days old or less, they create a tab in the Site Health page and display the errors. They do the same if memory usage is above 85% or below 30M.

Under the conditions mentioned above, we understand that our plugins may not function as intended. Please note that if you uninstall our plugins, the error message disappears, but the errors will continue to occur and be logged in the error_log file automatically, potentially affecting your site’s performance. However, we won’t be able to alert you anymore.

To learn more about errors:

https://wptoolsplugin.com/site-language-error-can-crash-your-site/

Cheers,

Bill

Hi again. So, another interesting discovery. I installed the plugin you referenced and checked the ‘Show Errors’ tab. The message displayed indicates, “Your site has errors. Here are the last lines of the error log files.” Here is an image of this page: https://prnt.sc/TJddTqo2pOev

I checked the root of the WordPress installation and did not see any log files. I then enabled the logging option for this plugin, which I just installed. I also added the appropriate lines to the wp-config.php file, as explained here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-find-and-access-wordpress-error-logs-step-by-step/

The screenshot above remained the same. When I checked the error (not access) log on the server, I found a couple of entries like this: The access log request has been truncated.’, referer: https://REDACTED/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=objectcache; however, they were not really recent.

No other error logs were written anywhere that I can see. I checked for the file debug.log in the folder ‘wp-content’ and found no such file. I have no idea why any process would think the site has errors if the suspected errors are not going to be displayed for me, and honestly, troubleshooting that non-issue is of little importance to me right now.

As you mentioned, with your plugin uninstalled, the error notification goes away, and that is good enough for me.

Thanks for your time looking into this.

One more note. I checked the memory usage on the server. It has 2GB installed, and has averaged nearly 1.2GB free during the past 6 months. The lowest it ever got was around 1GB free, which happened 4 different times over the same period, and all were very brief instances.

If you are referring to WordPress memory allocation, I have never received any warning from the monitoring software on this server about that. I have on a couple of 1GB servers, but never a 2GB or higher server.

Cheers.

EDITED TO ADD MORE INFORMATION DISCOVERED BEFORE UNISTALLING THE WPTOOLS PLUGIN:

No Javascript errors found last 3000 entries of log_error file.

WordPress Memory Limit (*): 128 MB??? |???Your usage now:10 MB ???|???Total Php Server Memory: 256 MB???

Memory usage: 16%.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by boardboss.