jnilles

I have deactivated or eliminated plugins and switched to a default twentyfourteen theme. No change in the results; I still can’t get to the dashboard.

To repeat: wp-admin allows me to log in and then produces: “There has been a critical error on this website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.” I do not get any message in my site admin email box.

I can circumvent the above situation by going to wp-admin/edit.php. The rest of the site appears to be functioning OK except that I cannot get to the dashboard even though I can make new posts.

I’m now not using the 2018 GA plugin; it caused a white screen so I deleted it.

The header I referred to above is what one gets when clicking on the More button in an abbreviated post. For example, from my new post:
https://www.jalahq.com/blog/slowly-slowly-then-all-of-a-sudden/#more-1054.
But since it worked properly for this new post I retract the comment.

As you can see, the site is https://www.jalahq.com/blog/

BTW the version of googleanalytics that whited out my wordpress when I copied it into wp-content/plugins was from 2018. Presumably a newer version won’t do this.

I have cleaned up the permissions and file ownership issues. Thank you, Steve!!

I have copied some of the plugins (but not the fatal google analytics) to wp-content/plugins. I have successfully entered and published a new post via wp-admin/edit.php. But I still can’t get to the dashboard without an error message. Also, the header link has reverted to numerical instead of reflecting the post title. Weird!

How can I get the dashboard back?

The blog is now running in good shape after I updated my wp-config.php file to include the latest version. However, I still can’t log into it in order to add material. This may be a permissions problem since I changed parts of the files to root ownership in order to thwart interference. I remember reading about permissions in the dim past but the description was too vague to be useful.

The other problem is that this server runs SuSE Leap 15.3 which doesn’t have a phpMyAdmin update. My existing version of phpMyAdmin also give me the white screen of death so my database delving is limited to mysql commands.

I have changed the database to an earlier backup; one that worked with no problems . The problem is unchanged. I conclude that the trouble is somewhere in the WP code. Where’s a good place to start looking — or is it easier to just replace all the WordPress code?

In dredging through the database tables I find that tens of thousands of entries in wp_commentmeta are of Russian origin. Here’s one of the shorter ones:

(513324,155261,'akismet_as_submitted','a:17:{s:14:\"comment_author\";s:10:\"ecuyutubiq\";s:20:\"comment_author_email\";s:28:\"[email protected]\";s:18:\"comment_author_url\";s:19:\"https://slkjfdf.net/\";s:15:\"comment_content\";s:120:\"https://slkjfdf.net/ - Rarhelo <a href=\"https://slkjfdf.net/\">Igodasazi</a> xye.adbn.mysite.com.oct.nr https://slkjfdf.net/\";s:12:\"comment_type\";s:7:\"comment\";s:7:\"user_ID\";i:0;s:7:\"user_id\";i:0;s:17:\"comment_author_IP\";s:14:\"62.210.178.249\";s:13:\"comment_agent\";s:120:\"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; ) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.34 Safari/537.36 Edg/83.0.478.25\";s:7:\"user_ip\";s:14:\"62.210.178.249\";s:10:\"user_agent\";s:120:\"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; ) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.34 Safari/537.36 Edg/83.0.478.25\";s:4:\"blog\";s:27:\"https://www.mywebsite.com/blog\";s:9:\"blog_lang\";s:5:\"en_US\";s:12:\"blog_charset\";s:5:\"UTF-8\";s:9:\"permalink\";s:46:\"https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/management-stupid/\";s:10:\"POST_ak_js\";s:13:\"1624477536818\";s:19:\"POST_ak_hp_textarea\";s:100:\"https://slkjfdf.net/ - Rarhelo <a href=\"https://slkjfdf.net/\">Igodasazi</a> xye.adbn.mywebsite.com.oct.nr\";}')

The above is all in one line, of course. Since I have deactivated Akismet, might I need to reactivate it to get the site up and running?

I routinely keep backups via mysqldump after each blog post. I have restored it from the last post in June but no joy from that. I suppose I could restore from an earlier date but then I might run into conflicts from WordPress; it keeps updating the databases.

As you can see from my earlier comments, I have already enabled wp_debug and wp_debug_log. The log provided a slew of comments errors (several thousand), entirely from Russian sites. My testing the database apparently changed what was a working website into the white screen of death. I have since installed no-white-screen.php and further modified the config, to no effect. The more I try to fix it, the worse it gets.

I tried to delete the item 2 entries above but succeeded only in turning the site into a blank page: no messages or anything else. From bad to trash!

Debug shows 2 (at least) errors so far:

1. [09-Jul-2021 16:55:40 UTC] PHP Notice: Undefined index: a:1:{s:3:”ssl”;b:1;} in /wp-includes/class-requests.php on line 214

2. [09-Jul-2021 16:58:20 UTC] WordPress database error Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8mb4_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation ‘=’ for query SELECT comment_ID FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 810 AND comment_parent = ‘0’ AND comment_approved != ‘trash’ AND ( comment_author = ‘ShawnQueri’ AND comment_author_email = ‘[email protected]’ ) AND comment_content = ‘Because death disposition penetrate to all complex organisms, without reproduction, . . . .
[the rest is a long tirade]

This series of 1 and 2 keeps repeating, although the content of the long 2 entries changes. So far all these overlong comments seem to come from Russian IP addresses.

Thanks! I think I have already disabled all plugins. At least none show up when I go to wp-admin/plugins. My server doesn’t show any apache errors but I have now enabled wp-debug and wp-debug_log. This site already runs the twenty fourteen theme and it is up to date.

We’ll see what the debug log shows after a day or two. Meanwhile, the site appears to be running perfectly. As long as I don’t try to get to the dashboard.

The commercial support is not my point. My point is that my FTP server apparently cannot find the plugin directory of my site(s). I assume that this is an FTP configuration error at my end and I need help to track it down. For starters, what does WordPress look for when it tries an FTP transfer from plugin-producer to recipient?

Yes, I ordinarily do the updates manually: download the plugin and move it to the plugin directory. This works except in cases (like WordPress-seo paid version) where updates are not downloadable. So the failure of FTP causes problems ranging from extra work to complete inability to update.

Thanks, Lisa,

The whole site is on a server 6 feet from my desk.
“you can deactivate your plugins by renaming the plugins folder.” Good plan. I’ll try it after I’m sure the other components are together.

Since I am also the webhosting support team I assume that my version of phpMyAdmin works only with php 5.4, hence is also allergic to php 7. I do have current backups of the database(s) and a fairly recent backup of the files, both local and online. Will a new version of phpMyAdmin recognize the databases or will I have to start over with them — I have several other databases unrelated to WordPress?