johnlem

This “solution” appears to have made things worse.

Having previously deleted Spectra, our options table showed 477 records and 4mb.

After re-installing Spectra, our options table increased in size to 485 records and is still at 4mb.

Upon re-deleting Spectra, our options table is at 484 records and is still at 4mb.

How is this an improvement? Spectra has in fact left MORE gunk on our database than before we followed your advice.

Please provide detailed instructions as to how to get the unwanted files off the databases of users who are no longer using Spectra.

EG – Do we have to reinstall, update then delete again?

Whatever these files are, they are still on our database despite our deleting Spectra, so we would like to know what you propose to get them cleared off.

Hey! Guess what. In the process of rebuilding sites to get away from Spectra, Google did indeed detect that our sites are now slower (see above), especially on mobile. Great! Thanks BSF! Awesome result for e-commerce.

In light of the deafening silence from BSF with regard to a fix for all the autoload stuff they dumped on us now causing this problem (it’s been over a month now we’ve waited), we sorted it ourselves.

In case it helps anyone, this is what we did (yes there is a fair amount of work, but there’s no other way to really get rid of Spectra):

1. Backup backup backup EVERYTHING (and/or use a staging site if that’s your thing)
2. Install and activate Kadence blocks plugin (see https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/kadence-blocks/) (of course there are other options, this suited our sites and it a pleasure to use), do NOT disable Spectra (yet).
3. Rebuild pages replacing Spectra blocks/etc with Kadence, deleting Spectra blocks as you go. A good deal of this can be cut-and-paste from Spectra to Kadence, but occasionally things don’t play nicely and you just have to rebuild the block
4. Purge cache and check live site to ensure front end is still working
5. Disable Spectra, purge cache and recheck everything is still working front end

Breathe.

Then to clean up the database mess:

1. Backup everything
2. Delete Spectra (yay!)
3. We installed WP-optimize at this stage to check in on the database and reoptimise all the images, etc. Nice plugin.
4. At this point your site should be working, reasonably clean on optimisation and Spectra deleted BUT because the developers have not sorted out a proper deletion function, you will almost certainly still have a bunch of Spectra gunk in your database. The biggest problem here is the autoload stuff, which can, and does, slow things down. This is not so easy to address, as many plugins like WP-Optimize will show you the table itself, but not the contents.
5. Install and activate AAA Option Optimizer plugin (see https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/aaa-option-optimizer/). Look at settings page, which is a very helpful chart of all the stuff in the options table of your database. This is a sweet little plugin and I’m glad we found it.
6. Because we are ultra cautious, we disabled the autoload on all the stuff from Spectra (see https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/clean-up-after-uninstalling-spectra/ for info from BSF on prefixes to look for, although “often have” in their response isn’t exactly comforting).
7. Purge cache and check all front-end is working.
8. To be ultra safe, leave a few days to make sure everything is working for customers before deleting those now disabled Spectra bits on the options table.

Next step – get rid of Astra.

It takes a lot to make us this cross. Cue empty apologies from BSF…

The trouble with the BSF “advice” is that the autoload gunk in question is in the options table, which for a whole host of reasons cannot be deleted wholesale, as they should know.

In case it helps anyone, we’re having a really positive experience with AAA Option Optimizer plugin (see https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/aaa-option-optimizer/).

It shows the contents of the options table with buttons to shut off autoload and/or delete for each bit, so you can track down the Spectra gunk and get rid once and for all.

Kudos to @karlemilnikka – thanks for the helpful info over the weeks.

Thanks for the info from the BSF FB page.

To BSF: Too little, too late. We’re out.

“After a few more releases…” What? Is that a plan? What are we supposed to do in the meantime? You marked this issue “resolved”? Seriously?

We’re not prepared to wait and see if this drags down our page times and Google punishes us across ads, merchant listings, page rank, etc. We’re not interested in waiting to see if/when this ever gets sorted out or what we have to do to apply whatever “fix” comes. Very not interested in waiting to see what stunt BSF will pull next.

Pages do not “run smoothly” in any case, so that’s not a decent excuse. I have to (or used to have to) check our sites daily because Spectra randomly deletes content, monkeys with layout, switches features on and off and deletes images across sites like an ill-behaved toddler.

In case it helps anyone, I am rebuilding our sites with Kadence. It’s great. Producing beautiful pages, and with much less faffing about than Spectra as a bonus.  

This isn’t an “inconvenience”. It is another in a long series of BSF demonstrating quite plainly that they don’t care a whit about the impacts of their experiments on users. So we’re out.

What we need now from BSF is comprehensive instructions for how to delete Spectra and all the hidden gunk completely from our site. Urgently, please, so we can “resolve” this.

Yes this update that was supposed to fix a problem that the previous problem-solving update caused has generated a new problem on our sites, too. Hours and hours of SEO work over months now jeopardised. Why exactly?

We all know BSF has a reputation for dumping stuff on sites that shouldn’t be there/doesn’t work (hidden affiliate issue, sooo many bugs in updates that require even more fixes, “updates” that continually break layout, etc), so we’re now wondering why they’ve issued an update that is flagging sites with an autoload problem. Why the need to autoload all this guff and bloat all of a sudden?

Perhaps they didn’t realise we’re all using WordPress (so we’d see it in the site health check)? No, wait, that can’t be it…

It’s telling, isn’t it, that whenever there is a new Spectra update (and why on Earth are there so MANY updates? Sure smells like something is badly wrong if it takes so much coddling…), the very first thing we do it check this forum to see if the proposed update is wreaking havoc.

Sure are glad we checked again today. Newbies take note – this is not an isolated occurrence.

After last year’s catastrophe, and the constant irritation of having to find half a day to fix our two sites every time there’s an update (because updates invariably trash our formatting, or worse), these folks just can’t be trusted anymore, so pre-update manual checks for nonsense are a must. Apologies to the keen users who jump right in – you are our coal mine canaries.

There just aren’t enough hours in a day to have to chase down constant problems caused by updates to what should be plug-and-play software.

So I truly feel your pain, and we thank you for posting this because I will simply ignore this update until we see there is an acknowledgement that this is NOT “isolated to one machine” (see the growing number of other posts about reported problems with this update being shuffled off onto customers – nice!) and a fix provided.

HINT: the customers who have been with you* a long time should be a source of loyalty for you, and the fact that you are changing things that affect their work means you should look after them as a priority. Whatever was attempted with the “upgrade” from the (perfectly useful) Ultimate Add-ons to Spectra seems to be disproportionately hammering folks who have tried to stick with it over time (or put off the apparently inevitable rebuild with something else). Perhaps the business model is about getting new users and to heck with the ones who already struggle to make it work?

One would have thought they would have learned by now not to release things that don’t work and/or to fess up right away that they need to clean up a mess. Perhaps I’ll follow your lead and spend half a day looking for something reliable and migrating.

*I still struggle to actually type out “Brainstorm Force” as it’s just too silly, particularly given the circumstances

Just in case anyone is still tempted to use Astra, 9 months after the catastrophic mess created by bad updates (see our multiple comments above):

I went in today to simply add a file for our customers to download. The file function produces a huge grey square in the middle of the page with a tiny pdf image in the middle of it. Nasty and certainly not the image of the pdf in question that used to be produced by this action.

So I tried the media and text option. That produces a block with text on one side an absolutely nothing on the other side when I upload the file.

Forty-five minutes later I need to decide if I want to ignore our customer feedback asking for this download or rebuild my entire e-commerce site. Fantastic. Thanks for that.

Sure I get emails from Astra people telling me how sorry they are, but what I want is a website that works. It is simply not credible that after 9 months and truly countless self-congratulatory “fixes” from Astra we still can’t put a file download on a page.

Can’t tell you how much we still regret choosing UAG and being forced to use Astra as a result. Save yourself a massive headache and find something else.

Oh. And I’ve just now discovered that the last update stripped formatting off some of my pages randomly. So instead of spending my day on sales, I’m searching for problems on my websites and trying to figure out how to fix them. Thanks.

This was a perfectly good way to build a page before. It is now overly complicated. Unnecessarily complicated. And it gets worse all the time. I do not want to have to relearn how to use the plugin every time I want to update a page.

We now have to hunt around for whatever the new function is called, because so much has been changed in the plugin, but clearly we need style and such to match with existing pages. When we guess wrong, the undo button doesn’t work. Today I tried choosing an option that purported to enable text with an image at left. I got a bright green section with a pear in it. Why? Why won’t it undo? Why when I try again to I get an error saying “no results found”? Why when I try to take it out I get “remove query loop”?

Overall it is a fancy, frustrating mess that soaks up time we do not have and do not want to spend. Perhaps you are gaining ground among web pros who have time to spend (and bill to someone else), but you will certainly lose at least this small business who needs a smart-looking site that doesn’t take days to update. If you wanted to build a pro version, that’s what you should have done and left the rest of us in peace.

When we rebuild the site we absolutely will find something better. Really should have left well enough alone. I wasn’t going to respond to your note, but today’s experience trying to make a five minute update that has already taken half an hour just made me angry and frustrated that I am shackled to this plugin unless I want to rebuild two sites for this business.

Hey yeah thanks for the lecture on patience – we sure are getting a lot of practice these days with Astra and Spectra (new name still gives a chuckle, thanks).

So turns out when we did the latest (12th?) Spectra update the formatting issues resolved themselves. So looks kinda like it was indeed a conflict with a plugin – the one you designed to go with Astra. Maybe you can’t assume you know about all of the impacts of your “upgrade” even weeks later? Blaming other plugins is certainly easy, granted.

We appreciate the excitement these updates introduce into our work days. We never quite know what will happen or how much of our workload will be tossed up in the air. Still managing to find time to read this though: https://themeisle.com/blog/astra-theme-alternatives/