shacker

OK, got an answer from the Softaculous devs:

https://www.softaculous.com/board/index.php?tid=5535&tpg=1#p20204

Short version: No need to worry about conflicts. Softaculous can do major version upgrades as well as minor, and it can be optionally disabled by web hosts.

Yeah, I’ll try that next. Just thought I might tap the massive community here first. Thanks.

LOL – I am a web host, trying to get to the bottom of this so I know what to tell my cPanel/Softaculous users, or how to disable it on their behalf if it’s dangerous.

True. But still, does the Softaculous upgrader simply use WP’s upgrade API, or is it “forcing the upgrade” from outside?

I got bitten by this too. AU simply would not work on my site, and there was no log or indication anywhere about why it was failing to update. Had to resort to trial and error, and finally nailed the problem down to Better WP Security. Disabling the plugin overnight got AU working again. Of course I don’t want to leave the plugin disabled. So it looks like the culprit is the setting “Hide core update notifications from users who cannot update themes?” However that setting also says “Please note that this only makes a difference in multi-site installations” which this site is not.

So… maybe the note that it only affects multi-site installations is incorrect?

Finally solved! I didn’t want to disable plugins and then just wait around for AU to try on its own time, but finally started disabling plugins one at a time. Most reluctantly, I disabled Better WP Security, and 12 hours later the site updated itself.

So there is a conflict with that plugin. Specifically, I believe (but am not sure) it’s the setting “Hide core update notifications from users who cannot update themes.” However that setting also says “Please note that this only makes a difference in multi-site installations” which this site is not. We’ll see.

So, problem solved but only through trial and error. The apparent complete lack of activity logging in WP core made this problem extremely difficult to solve.

Anyway, yay!

Again, I RUN the hosting service and I know exactly where the apache error logs are. I don’t see anything remotely related to WP or upgrades. Here is the complete output of

grep "/home/bird/public_html/blog" error_log

https://pastebin.com/2YEErhRm

The question was whether there is something else I should be looking for in the error log.

Thanks,
Scot

Not sure what to search for in apache logs, but I just installed the Advanced Updates Manager, which has an option to send debug info with emails – hoping I’ll get something useful from that next time it checks.

Hi Marshall –

Forcing it like that (by manually accessing update-core.php) always succeeds – no problems with that in the past. It’s just the waiting for it to do it itself that never happens.

Thanks,
Scot

Hi Marshall –

How long is it between runs of auto-update attempts. I’d hate to leave the theme and plugins disabled for days. There’s got to be a better way to trouble shoot this!

I run the hosting company ?? We have hundreds of WP sites with auto-update working fine – it’s just this one that is refusing to play nice and I have no idea why.

Thanks for any other suggestions!

Interesting – thanks for the suggestions! I think that in this case I’ll save Hueman for my next new project rather than trying to back-fill this long-standing site with featured images.

So I have a blog going back 12 years, with thousands of posts. After activating Hueman, all posts just have blank placeholder images on index pages. Does this mean that I would have to go into each of the thousands of posts and set a favored image to replace all of the placeholders with actual images?

Also, some posts just have embedded YouTube videos. The Regenerate Thumbnails feature is not going to add thumbnails for those videos, is it?

Thanks.

Thanks guys. Sounds like it’s ultimately a fool’s errand. I’ll set up some firewall rules and leave it be. Would just love a glimpse into these spammers minds… to understand what they stand to gain by requesting the same 404s thousands of times over and over…

Yeah, I figured it was bot traffic, but why would they be hitting read-only feed URLs? Any best techniques for dealing with them?

Mielke – Have you updated the plugin? It’s definitely tested and working in 3.5.