whynot

Moshu,

Thank you for trying to help. I don’t know it the following can help in turn, but I’lll try anyway:

First I’m sorry that I only back up the SQL database once a year. I’ve been back on a 56K modem afer a few years of ADSL, and it’s very painful to backup the database via phpmyadmin. Not only because of how slow it is but because there are limits to the size of the tables one can back up on my ISP.

It is all very nice to say I should do an entire backup rather than individual tables one at a time, but the reality is that it cannot be done. My ISP sets a MB limit on SQL tables backup sizes (I’m not sure whether it is due to their version of phpmyadmin or some other internal limitation), therefore I can only back up tables other than WP-Comments and WP-posts because both exceed the size limit.

Regarding cross references between tables I am well aware of this factor. This is why after I restored the missing tables that WP v2.6.2 deleted, the blog is now more or less working as it used to – i.e. under WP 2.1.

Regarding the missing cross-references to articles posted but with a “blank” entry concerning their “categories” I found that after restoring the “missing” “post2cat” table which WP 2.6.2 caused, the missing entries only applied to the 6 months or so of articles prior to the restauration of that table.

In other words, ALL articles posted previous to that DO have the correct cross-table-link to the category(ies) originally entered.

I understand about tables being cross related by other tables. This is why I restored the “Post2cat” table, with the above mentioned results, clearly showing that somehow, the information passed on by that “in-between” table is not lost, but somehow recent posts HAVE lost it.

I am sorry that my problem is such a pain.

Ok, thank you MichaelH, I will try to do the whole thing as per the book.

In the meantime, after having restored the missing database tables, I see one little hickup which I don’t know whether it can be fixed or not.

It’s to do with the categories (as in: when you post an article, you tag which category{ies) it belongs to.

As it is now (after restoring all I could EXCEPT the wp-comments and wp-posts tables since they are both one year old), I have this strange thing by which all the articles posted show with no category, or rather more exactly:

Title of Article
Posted by XXX under Uncategorized …

The “uncategorized” word is not marked as a hyperlink. I mention this because in the “categories” available, there is an “Uncategorized” one.

The page itself listing the categories available is still there, which I was able to verify by “editing” an article and assigning it 2 categories, with the result that it “works”, meaning those 2 categories show as hyperlinks in the “Posted by XXX under Politics, News…).

In other words, it’s as if the WP-posts table got modified somehow and the row (or is it column) referring to WHICH category(ies) each article was assigned to has gone into lala-land.

Is this possible? If this is the case, I’m screwed because I can’t restore the WP-Posts table since it would mean that any article posted within the last year would disappear.

The WP-categories table looks fine, and for good measure I restored it, but alas no difference.

This is not very important, I can live with it, but I would very much like to understand the mechanism by which all articles have lost every assigned “category” and yet it is possible to modify them right now and assign them again manually.

I am sorry if this sounds really messy. I hope you understand what I am saying.

Thank you again for your help.
Philippe
PS; doing backups of the SQL database is a real pain. On my ISP you are limited to a certain amount of MB, which means it is impossible to back up the WP-posts and WP-comments tables. ??

Michael H,

Thank you for your fast response and the link to the “Upgrading_WordPress_Extended” – which I’m reading right now.

When you say “You are getting that error” I assume you mean after I “downgraded” back to v2.1, right?

Regarding “upgrading the database”, I took a look at it via phpmyadmin, and here is what I found:

The upgrade to v 2.6.2 deleted 3 tables from the SQL server database and modified the WP-Users table (which is why I couldn’t log in).

Restoring from a one-year old backup of the tables, I am now luckily able to run the blog with v2.1 as I used to. Thankfully, the WP-comments and WP-posts tables were left intact, and as a result the blogs appears functional.

2 questions please:

1. you say “the database was upgraded”. Well, the thing is it seems it wasn’t upgraded properly since it gave me those error messages.

2. What is the difference between “deleting all the old files first” and overwriting them with the new ones? I mean, when I did the reverse downgrade, I used the same FTP trick, i.e. overwrite all the “new” WP files with the old ones and WP works fine (it first looked all screwed up but that’s because of the missing tables and the WP-Users table altered by v2.6.2, and now that I have restored the tables, it seems ok).

Ok, thank you. When you say “use legacy my-hacks.php file support” … what does it mean exactly?

I’m no php programmer, but there are a few things which, when I see a php file I can hope, praying hard, to modify, and many others where I have no clue whatsoever.

I am hoping with something with some examples of code. I tried to fiddle around with the 2 lines in the kses.php files, leaving the first one alone, and trying to copy bits and pieces of it to the second line, and even tried to copy the entire first line replacing the second line with it but causes the blog to start with an error on line such and such.

What I am getting at is that if there isn’t some kind of basic tutorial on the syntax to do what I want, I will be helpless.

I mostly want to be able to give commenters the ability to add pictures (img src= ….) , font size choice, and ordered/unordered lists.

Ok Moshu, I had no intention of fiddling with them anyway, LOL

I will look around for this admin panel control thing you mention. But right now, it’s not important, as I am in heaven. No SPAM for over 24 hours instead of 600 every hour! Incredible.

Thank you so much again.

Moshu,

This is not really important, but I am just curious.

It is not important because it seems I am at last cured from massive SPAM, between BBand Akismet doing their jobs.

But curious about tweaking them.

When I go in the dashboard, => plugins, and see Akismet and BB, there is an “edit” link, but if I click on it I get directly into editing the PHP files, something I do NOT want to do, LOL.

Is there a more user-friendly way to change their settings?

Moshu, you are a genius.

I did just like you said, unzipped, made a “Bad-Behavior” directory under “wp-content/plugins”, FTP’ed to the site, and now WP sees it and allowed me to activate it!!! It’s like sheer magic.

No need to edit any PHP file (One comment really scared be on the BB site, it said something about modifying the htaccess file).

Ok, I will look at the settings of both BB and Akismet and pray I don’t screw thing up!

If I do, I’ll come back crying for help again, LOL ??

WordPress is a really impressive piece of software. I wish I could donate some money – when I think of all the thousands of euros I have spent to Mr Bill Gate, it makes me embarrassed that such great software as WP is for free.

And you and all the other ppl who service these forums are awesomely wonderful to dedicate your time and knowledge to help others. Thank you.

Moshu,

Thank you again. I have downloaded the zip file of BadBehavior and have read the main page of their site and the 20 comments.

I am a little confused, scared and intimated. How do I install it? Do I create a “BadBehavior” directory in the plugin directories and that’s all?

I see some people saying you have to modify the PHP code to invoke it and make it work, but it is not very clear what has to be done exactly.

Can you advise me?

In the meantime, Akismet is doing great. No spam in 24 hours now!

The only thing is that I am still worried that if the spam is filtered out of the blog from viewing but still resides on the SQL database, then my ISP might get the shits again and block off all access to the blog’s site again.

Moshu,

Thank you SO MUCH again. Yes, you are right, in my second email from wordpress.com, there was a long long key (much longer than the password of my new account), and when I went to my blog and entered it, Akismet accepted it!!!!

I mistook the password for the key.

Incredible!

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help. It’s been driving me nuts for weeks now because my ISP is really getting the shits with my blog being inundated with SPAM and even got to the stage of blocking it off with a “Error 403 Access Forbidden” status. I couldn’t even get in via FTP, although I could access the actual SQL database via PhpMyAdmin. They even renamed my wp_comments table to wp_comments_SPAM.

I now see that in my plugins, Akismet is “active”. I still can’t believe it, LOL.

I will have to see if there are settings which prevent SPAM from even entering my ISP’s SQL database, rather than just being on mod queue, so that they don’t disable my account again because of 500 robotic spam comments bombarding my blog every 5 minutes.

Do you have any advice on this? I am so scared of doing something wrong!

Again, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

Moshu,

Thank you again for helping. I was not able to recover my account details, but I created a new account and received an email with a password, which I guess is the magid API key.

But this doesn not help me with my existing blog because it is not named the same, I guess.

When I enter the password in the Askimet configuration of my blog, it tells me it is an invalid password, which makes sense, I guess.

So how do I tell Askimet on my existing blog to enable itself? Now it is hosted on a third party ISP, and maybe I will look into having wordpress hosting it in the near future, but for now, I would like to have Askimet working but I can’t because I can’t get a password/API key for it.

Thank you Moshu, the page worked.

However it says to create a wordpress.com account and when I try it it tells me I already have one by the same name which does not suprise me because I think I already did this some time back.

But it does not let me log in, all it makes mention of is to create a new account.

But it also says that if you already have an account, then ‘your API key is listed on your profile page’

Are they talking about my account on wordpress.com or my blog dashboard?

If I go in my blog to my dashboard => users => your profile, I look and look and do not see any API key.

Where is it?

If it is on my wordpress.com account, how do I get there, instead of every time getting a page telling me to create a new account?

MichaelH,

Thank you for replying. I’ve tried a few things but no luck so far. One of the problems is that both the new and old site are on the same ISP, so that the IP address is the same. I’m sorry, I am quite ignorant and am obviously tackling things that are beyond me.

When logging on the ISP’s “old” account and launching phpmyadmin I see at the top:

Welcome to phpMyAdmin 2.6.3-pl1
MySQL 5.0.37 running on sql.free.fr as [email protected].3

But then if I log out, log back in under the “new” account and fire phpmyadmin, I see exactly the same thing – as if the “new” site is pointing to the same database. And yet WP complains it can’t get to it.

It’s probably me fiddling around not knowing what I am doing, because when I first used phpmyadmin on this “new” site there was no database at all – but now it shows the dianne one.

From what I understand, each user on Free (the ISP) gets a https://username.free.fr/ site, and when you enable the PHP/SQL stuff it creates a database named after your username.

Did I really screw everything up?

I was wondering… if I could email you and give you the logins and passwords of both accounts, maybe you could take a look? I’ll pay you – Paypal or whatever you prefer.

I’m so upset with the blog being down, and since Free do not give any service on their hosting, the old account being blocked could go on being so forever (I managed to talk to someone after ringing Paris long distance about 50 times, and he took a look and said the account was NOT blocked, so as far as they are concerned there is no technical problem, even though he confirmed that he too was getting the 403 access denied error).

If you were at all willing to help this way, here is my email address: [email protected]

Epicalex,

Thank you for answering. If I may, can I pick your brain a bit more, lol:

I see 2 lines:

$allowedposttags = array….
$allowedtags = array …

The first one has millions of tags, so that would be the one that a publishing member could use, right?

Wherea the second line only has a restricted number of tags, so that would be what people commenting can use?

Am it guessing right? Sorry I’m not very good at PHP stuff.

The other question I have is:

Is there any great danger in allowing all tags in comments? Say, for instance, it I copy paste the first line into the second one, giving effectively any commentor access to the entire palette of tags an Admin has (assuming I have understood it right, of course), am I putting myself at some major risk of someone doing something really nasty?

So far, the only tags that are actually a pain (because of SPAM) are the URL tags, and ironically enough they are allowed for commenters. But I am wondering if some of the Admin allowed tags could really screw up the blog if used by a malicious commenter.

In the links you ppl kindly provided, I found the following information:

“To completely disable trackbacks, you will have to edit each past post and uncheck Allow Pings from the Write Post SubPanel. Alternatively, you could just simply delete the wp-trackback.php file, or run this MySQL query, from the command line on a shell account, or using PHPMyAdmin: UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=”closed”;”

This last solution (the SQL query) looks like a pretty neat one. I have 2 questions about it:

1. has anyone tried it and is it safe (and is the syntax correct)?

2. if at any stage down the track I wanted to “undo” it, what would be the corresponding SQL query?

Philippe

Thank you for the tip DianeV.

I’ve been reading Samboll’s links, and yes, you’re right, this .htaccess is pretty daunting stuff. Well, at least for someone as ignorant as I am, lol.

Philippe