BetaCandy

Ha, I figured it out – I just needed to increase the disk size so it had room to create the backup. I had about 20MB disk space free, and the backup was 18MB.

Sam problem. My site’s rather small, but my backup is completing instantly with a size of 0 bytes.

Here’s the error message, with my domain specific stuff redacted:

Warning: filesize() [function.filesize]: stat failed for /home/mysite/public_html/wp-content/uploads/wp-clone/wpclone_backup_05th_Feb_2014_07-18PM_Blo_NXPmF50ZcT.zip in /home/mysite/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-clone-by-wp-academy/lib/functions.php on line 177

Does anyone even have a clue what such a plugin would involve? Like, which aspects of WordPress would have to be manipulated? For example, is it just a matter of getting the future con job to NOT hide the post until the “future publish” date? Even that info might help me write something myself, or hack an existing plugin, or find someone I could hire to develop such a plugin.

Fixed it! It was a spam plugin issue.

I’d rather not post it publicly for various reasons. If you’ll give me suggestions what you would look for in the source code or whatever, I’ll see what I can find!

Anyone?

New info: I tried to leave his comments for him, by logging out and using his name, email, etc. I got the same error, using Firefox and Windows! I was able to post them just fine as myself, and then change my contact info to his.

Any thoughts?

That fixed it. I guess with aggressive spam filters, it’s always important to set a “don’t check approved commenter” type option just in case any of your good commenters resemble spammers in some superficial way.

Thanks for the quick response!

We don’t put IPs in the blacklist for that very reason – just keywords and email addresses. We looked at the blacklist and can’t find anything that matches her info.

We use Antispam Bee. I did recently select the option to “enable stricter checks” on incoming comments, and I also got a Project Honeypot API and activated that. To see if that’s the problem, I’ve now selected the option for not checking commenters who have approved comments already, and emailed her to test it and see if it fixes the problem. I’ll post the results, once I know.

Solution, in case anyone needs it:

I had a big list of typical spam words in my “Comment Moderation” box under discussion. Even though I never did find any that in anyway matched any part of these commenters’ names, emails or URLs, removing that list did the trick.

No, you seem to be misunderstanding everything I post. Everything you’re telling me, I already know, and none of it addresses my needs. Of course I use my Comment Moderation list. I am an intelligent person who’s been using WordPress for 5 years – please do stop assuming I’ve never used the backend, because seriously, it’s a waste of your energy.

The problem is really very simple. I don’t want to approve one comment because it was acceptable, then have that commenter turn around and spout hate-speech and hurt feelings in the few hours before I or one of my editors get around to deleting it. I check the site 4-5 times a day, but if something’s up for three hours, several hundred people will see it. A better solution for me is to be able to put new commenters through a more extensive trial period before turning them loose. This comes as close as is practically possible to guaranteeing I won’t have any mean-spirited comments (or sneaky spam) showing up and being seen before I can delete it.

Unfortunately, WordPress is geared toward small blogs. Which is fine – that’s it’s history. But there’s got to be a way to make it more suitable for large, and in particular, hot-topic sites. When readers see a comment on your site, they assume you’ve read it and approved of it. They have no idea what’s involved in moderating comments unless they happen to run a large site themselves, which most don’t. If they come across an ugly comment, it reflects badly on the site even though we would’ve deleted it just a couple of hours later.

To mitigate this, I’m looking into plugins that allow readers to report distressing comments or vote them down to invisibility. That might reassure them that not every comment which shows up is something we heartily approve of. But it’s still not the best solution.

There simply needs to be something between moderating every comment and moderating just one comment from every user.

Looks like the reason this isn’t such an easy fix (I’ve found other people requesting the same thing) is the way WP is set up. If you’ve checked the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” box, it searches the comments for one instance of that name/email and approves all future comments. I found another blogger asking for the ability to “unapprove” someone you once approved, and the only way to do that is to remove all his previous posts (which can turn old comment threads non-sensical) so WP won’t find anything approved by him.

*Sigh*

I have no idea which core files to attempt to muck around with. If anyone has any idea, please let me know.

Another option would be to leave it so all comments are moderated BUT I have a list of commenters I can approve specially so they don’t get modded. That’s what Thoughtful Comments claims to do, but the only way I could find to do it was via the admin interface under Users, which won’t let me de-mod unregistered commenters.

I thought maybe someone knew of a less-known plugin that isn’t hosted here or something.

This is a feature WordPress could really use. WordPress’ standard options are fine for smaller blogs or blogs that aren’t on hotly debated topics. For bigger or more intense blogs, however, one comment isn’t always enough for you to tell whether someone’s going to turn out a troll. (And I am seeing a new trend with spam, where they leave a pretty decent comment that I ordinarily would let right through – except they link to their site that sells handmade jewelry or something. Is it spam, or is it just a nice commenter figuring he’ll publicize his site while he’s at it? I can’t tell, so I have to spam the comment rather than risk him posting a bunch of porn links or whatever and me not getting to it before Google crawls the site (which it does at least daily).

Registration won’t fix this. It might stop spammers (but not if they’re getting more willing to do some manual labor) but it won’t stop trolls.

I use Akismet and Tan Tan’s spam filter – great stuff, but still no help when someone’s borderline spam/troll and it’s a tough call and the wrong call gives them free access to the whole site.

Already did before starting this thread. I wouldn’t have asked for help if there’d been a plugin to do what I needed.

Thanks to Whooami spending DAYS troubleshooting this, the problem is resolved. It turned out not to be a hack or anything malicious, but rather a weird combination of several plugins and some coding in the theme causing 404s to generate new folders. Whooami found that removing any one of several plugins fixed the error, but the best solution was to improve the 404 page’s template coding so that WP-Super-Cache could recognize it as a 404 page (it was trying to cache them, and that was creating the new folders).

I may not be explaining this very well, but the end result was that a little change in the 404 template’s coding caused this to stop happening. And it was never actually being used by anyone maliciously, which is a relief.