RobAlex

It is beginning to sound like you might have been hacked. I checked out some of my sites’ wp_terms tables and found that in all cases it just contained categories I had created. No weird stuff. I’m afraid I’m in the middle of a project with a tomorrow deadline, so I can’t do a lot of digging. I’d search this support site and others to see how to recover from being hacked. I never have been so I don’t have first hand experience with handling it, sorry to say.
When you say reinstalling core made no difference, does that mean you still can’t add categories and have them stick? Do the categories you have on old posts exist in the wp_terms table? Can you add a category to the terms table directly and have it stick? Do your traffic stats indicate any unusual activity? Sorry this is turning out to be a tough problem for you. Hopefully others will stop by and help.

James Huff answers this well on this post. Let me know if you have questions about this. Key thing is to keep your wp-config.php since that contains your database link as well as other stuff, and your content directory which contains your content as well as themes and plugins.

James Huff
Support Representative
Posted 5 years ago #

Try downloading WordPress again and delete then replace your copies of everything except the wp-config.php file and the /wp-content/ directory with fresh copies from the download. This will effectively replace all of your core files without damaging your content and settings. Some uploaders tend to be unreliable when overwriting files, so don’t forget to delete the original files before replacing them.

I looked at the front end and saw it was working, including the submenu structure. It is most strange that the dashboard menu view shows a flat menu structure, because clearly it isn’t. Perhaps more specifics would help us. When you say you can’t post anything, what exactly happens when you try? Is the category list empty and all categories removed from posts and pages? Can you add one now?
I doubt it’s a WP upgrade. I have several sites and keep them current and don’t have a problem. Not knowing more, since the site is working it sounds like something might be amiss in the core files. You might try to reinstall the WP core and see if that fixes it.

I think the “help” is to not use this plugin. It is not reliable and therefore not a good solution. BackupWordPress takes a small bit of work in that you have to intentionally download backups to keep a copy on a different server, but it works.

Ah, now some puzzling behavior in my DropBox account makes sense. I was also receiving a constant flow of notifications that various image files had been updated from DropBox. While this plugin reports on my site that it is following my schedule I set for it, and has been successful, I have not actually checked my DropBox to make sure. The behavior your describe would explain what I’m experiencing, and it is not just lately but for quite a while now. I ended up disabling notifications from DropBox as they were driving me crazy. If, indeed, this plugin is doing this on my site I will deactivate it and continue to use BackUpWordPress, which I see is working fine. Only disadvantage is that I would have to manually copy my backup zip to DropBox; not a big deal.

UPDATE just now. I checked my Dropbox and this plugin has not been creating accurate backups, so it must be continuously trying, and that is why I’m getting all those image downloads. Another red flag is that all the links on the info page you get when you click View Details on the Plugins page on your site, you see that most links don’t work and the author’s account has been suspended.

So I will uninstall this and use my other backup. Then can reactivate my DropBox notifications. Whew!

I just downloaded and checked my last full backup as of 1/31/16 and it all looked fine. Hope you get this issue resolved.

And you give it 5 stars? Why?

Sounds like these plugins have problems. But I’m puzzled why you spent so much time with them; you state that there alternatives yet you continued to hit your head against this brick wall for some time after deciding they weren’t very good. Why?

Thanks Andrew for helping with this. Your suggestion seems to have solved the problem though we’ll probably never know what the specific cause was. Aren’t computers fun (at wasting one’s life)!

It’s not doing it any more! What I did was disable everything in firefox, saw behavior hadn’t changed so re enabled everything in firefox and now I don’t see the flickering bar in firefox or chrome. Some addon must have been having a problem that was fixed by turning off and on. Time will tell.

Lol – OK.

Disabled every add on and plug in on firefox, closed firefox and reopened it and no change in behavior of the site. Strangely it doesn’t happen on other sites I worked on, though this is the newest and I haven’t gone back to some of the older sites. At the time I made them, the problem was not there. In a way it’s not important in that this site is just for play, but if it happens on a “real” site, I could be in trouble so would be nice to know what’s going on.

I’ll try that though it seems improbable that there would be an add in on chrome that would make it do it there and another add in that would make it misbehave on firefox, but stranger things have happened on computers so may be worth a shot. Thanks for helping me with this.

You won’t see a scrollbar as such. It flickers on and off very fast so you’re seeing the bar about 5% of the time or less. It’s a flicker. I’m using the latest versions of the browsers. It does do it more on firefox than chrome; sometimes doesn’t occur on chGrome but almost always on firefox. The same complaint was made on that post 3 years ago so it’s apparently something persistent and hasn’t been fixed. Given the changes in both programs during such a long period, I’m surprised this quirk hasn’t changed, at least for some of us.

Update. Was going crazy with firefox so switched to Chrome and it started doing the flickering scroll bar thing there too! My site is as simple as one can get as I’m just practicing while reading through the Missing Manual book.

Link to site is https://www.transthought.net/wpmm/