Blog is down and we don’t know why

A link to the site may help.

Usually does…hahaha https://www.causewaybaitandtackle.com/fishing-blog

Thought it may have been the API key but finally retrieved it and entered it and still no luck.

change to the default theme?

disable plugins?

did you do either of these standard actions?

The only thing we didnt mess with were the themes and this is next. Yes, we did disable/enable all of the plugins with no luck. Our last resort is to update to the latest release in hopes that will work.

Would a plugin kill the blog out of nowhere? Nothing was touched and poof, the blog went down. Doesn’t make any sense.

Would a plugin kill the blog out of nowhere?

short answer: were this not the case, there wouldnt be 10’s of thousands of replies asking if this had been done first. we really dont pull this stuff out of our butts.

long answer:
depending on the plugin, yes it can.

LOTS of plugins call content that you dont have control over. Look at the front page of your site (after it finally loads what it loads)– compare that to google’s cache of your front page, and you can see where your site stops loading — you can see what ought to be under whats there.

lastly, look at your server logs, particularly any error logs.

GET Header is returning a 403 error, if that is any help.

//www.causewaybaitandtackle.com/fishing-blog/wp-content/themes/CausewayBaitAndTackle/images/header/

That url doesn’t end in a file extension, and directory access is forbidden by your server. Could that be a contributing factor?

yeah, if WP is handing out URLs that are forbidden for clients to access, that could very well cause loading problems ??

It may be appearing to hang on the client side while a javascript is waiting for the onload() handler, but that’s just a guess.

I guess never having a problem before and all of the sudden experiencing a problem, I never thought a plugin could cripple a site.

The server logs show nothing. We are going to go through the blog piece by piece to try and fix it. Thanks for the help whoo. If anything else comes to mind, please share.

looks fixed. what was the problem???

It seems that it has to do with the sidebar or the widgets. We have not found the exact problem but at least know where to look and have the blog functioning again. The new problem is, the option to remove a widget is not present and a list of active widgets is not populating. The only widget that showed up under our list of active widgets was the Search widget.

I’ll look into that 403 error. That is a new symptom. Thanks.

Clayton/Brainy… no luck on re-creating that 403 error.

Right now it still looks to be a widgets in the sidebar. It has been a while since I played with the widgets so I may be thinking something is supposed to happen when it’s not. Someone correct me if I’m wrong… are the active widgets supposed to show up with an edit option next to them?

All of the active widgets are showing but there is no option to edit or remove them. When I show all available widgets, there is only an option to add them and not remove the others. Is this normal?

I notice some of your pages are .asp…just out of curiosity, are you running this on a windows server? If so, and this is just my opinion, it would we well worth $10 or so a month to move your blog to a linux account…that would allow you to upgrade to 2.7 and would probably solve a lot of problems.

… no luck on re-creating that 403 error.

Last night while I was rechecking it, I watched the 403 change to a 503 (service unavailable), and then completely go away. Doesn’t seem to be an issue now.

Figaro, the main site and blog are both in .asp and being run on a windows server. We are actually in the process of discussing going to a linux server. We are currently running 2.7 and thinking about upgrading to the newest. We did have an issue moving the data base over the last time when we upgraded to 2.7 so I’m not how probable the new upgrade will be. Do you still recommend a linux account?

Clayton, the 503 is a normal occurrence on the hour. The server automatically reboots to clear things up. There was a nagging issue on the main site so our host put a check on it to see if anything came up. He also implemented a restart every hour so that is likely when you had your error.

Nobody has any suggestions on how to get my active widgets to show up so I can shut them off? I’m personally not a programmer and have very little knowledge with it. We are close with the programmers of our site and they have been helping out with trying to hone in on the issue. Now our hiccup is the widgets not being able to be removed to see which is causing the problem.