Bug? WordPress User Search Function breaks site

  • I encountered a very strange problem. I have a membership site with ~500 users. I am site admin. A user was having difficulty accessing the site, so I logged in and to find that user, entered part of the username into the “Search Users” field on the “All Users” page. I got a slow response and then was logged out, only to find the entire site trashed. Literally – the user database was completely wiped, and all posts/pages had been moved to trash — and who knows what other settings might have been messed up.

    (I could verify this because I do have FTP access, so I was able to create a new admin account for myself to log into the Dashboard and see what the problem was).

    At first, I thought that the site had somehow been hacked, but I did a restore from backup, and repeated the same search — and the same thing happened again. No other signs of hacking, so I’m pretty sure that whatever happened was caused by some sort of glitch in the search function.

    I don’t need help with my site because I simply restored from backup again — but now I am afraid to use the “Search Users” function again on any site. It could have course be due to a problem specific to that site – such as a theme or conflict plugin, or a corrupt entry in the database causing the search to fail.

    But I wanted to share this in case it is a bug and if anyone else has experienced anything similar.

    Also, I would like help understanding what happened and why. That is, why didn’t a problem with the search simply result in an error message? Why would a search problem result in the entire user database being wiped? And when the user database was wiped, why were all posts & pages moved to trash?

    The site is running the WordPress 4.9.7; PHP v. 7.1.19
    I don’t see anything in the PHP error logs.
    I ran a Wordfence scan and it came up clean — so no sign of malware on the site.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    Via PHPMYADMIN, run a check on all your tables. Maybe on is not corrupt enough not to let you login, but causes really bad stuff to happen when you search through it.

    Thread Starter Abigailm

    (@abigailm)

    After I restored from backup I ran both optimize & repair– so if there had been a problem, it would have been fixed. (I did run “check” again just to verify).

    So yes, corrupt database seems the most likely reason for a problem when running a search query…. but that still doesn’t explain why I would see posts & pages trashed. Or would that be something that wordpress would do automatically in response to the deletion of all active user accounts?

    Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    . Or would that be something that wordpress would do automatically in response to the deletion of all active user accounts?

    No, but the posts and pages are part of the database, so… that’s what I was thinking.

    Thread Starter Abigailm

    (@abigailm)

    But it’s not as if all of the posts/pages simply were corrupted. Rather, they were moved to trash — so the site worked, but just came up with a “not found” error. (Not the server error, but the page within the theme that showed the error). Menu settings were also messed up (so theme displayed, but not the regular nav menu). And all posts/pages were still there and could be bulk-restored from trash. (I played around a little with the backend functions before doing the full restore from backup)

    So basically there was a cascade of problems/issues triggered by a search, which affected more than the table that was searched.

    I checked the mysql error log for the site, and nothing showed up there. And nothing in the PHP error log.

    Anyway, for now it remains a mystery. Just one more reason that it’s a good idea to regularly backup all sites. I’m feeling shy about using that search function again — but if I do I’ll turn on “debug” first and see if that provides information and post again if the error recurs.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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