Wrecked my site’s appearamce

  • Resolved mongrel

    (@mongrel)


    2 years, 6 months ago

    This plugin claimed that it has NO EFFECT on how the site will appear to visitors —?guess what? That’s a complete lie. It disabled my theme, deleted my main menu, deleted my homepage sections, and made widgets completely disappear. I don’t even know what I can touch at this point because I don’t know yet how it did its damage.

    This is a disaster. Don’t trust this plugin.

    UPDATE: No, this really isn’t freaking funny. I can’t get my theme to come back. The site is stuck in troubleshooting mode, even when it claims to be out of troubleshooting mode, I come back to the plugin detective’s setting page and I see that the site is still in trouble shooting mode. WTF did your plugin do to my site?

    Honestly, what am I supposed to do? My theme thinks it’s a fresh install. I’ve been fine tuning this site FOR YEARS. I have clients who expect to see their ads in the places I promised them.

    The ONE reason I gave Plugin Detective a try was that it promised to not affect viewer experience. Not only did it fail on that count, but I LITERALLY DON’T KNOW if there’s some magic setting I have to revert or if I really have to start with a fresh freaking install of my theme and site that MY USERS WON’T RECOGNIZE and CAN’T NAVIGATE. I’m afraid that if I start trying to rebuild from scratch, I might make things worse due to reasons I can’t predict.

    • This topic was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by mongrel.
    • This topic was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by mongrel.
    • This topic was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by mongrel.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author croixhaug

    (@croixhaug)

    Hi mongrel, I’m sorry to hear what’s happened to your site. Do you have a backup of your site that we could try to look at together to get it back up and running?

    Based on your feedback, we are going to put additional warnings in the plugin for the user to confirm they have a backup of their site (or be working on a staging environment) before running Plugin Detective).

    Plugin Detective only manipulates the “active_plugins” value in the database and nothing else, which shouldn’t permanently affect the site (although it will definitely affect the site while doing the troubleshooting steps). It sounds like the theme you’re using may rely on a plugin or behave in a way where it permanently alters its settings. I haven’t seen this in my testing of other themes, but it’s clearly happened on your site and I’m sorry to hear of the mess it’s caused. Could you please share which theme you’re using? We’d like to specifically show a warning for that theme as well.

    Thanks,
    Nathan

    Thread Starter mongrel

    (@mongrel)

    Nathan —

    Thanks for your kind reply.

    I did have a fairly recent backup, though I’m choosing to make lemonade out of lemons and am piecing things together from this point forward. We all have sites on which we’ve been meaning to tweak this element or redesign that layout. Why restore a backup when I can start with a somewhat blank canvas.

    Navigation has been restored, and my readers will just have to manage a little “under construction” look for a couple weeks. Better than all the road construction we deal with every spring.

    I apologize for the wrathful tone of yesterday. I was filled with…wrath. But you didn’t deserve that dressing down, and I’d delete the note if I could. Thank you for working hard to develop WordPress accessories that are truly lifesavers for most of the people who seek out your plugins. Didn’t work for me, but I’m the exception and that’s fine. Keep up the good work, and let’s both use this as a teachable moment.

    Best regards —

    the mongrel

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by mongrel.
Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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