Can't log in & 500 Internal Error

  • Hello all,

    I help maintain a WordPress .org site at work (https://baafhslibrary.org). I’ve only been helping with this website (inherited from a previous creator) for a couple of months. Both myself, my boss, and a co-worker have a basic understanding of running this website. We mainly create new posts and pages at this point. I’m not even sure what version we were using– somewhere from the 3.1.1 to 3.2.1 version is my best guess.

    Recently the co-worker logged into the website to access the dashboard. I was not there, but she says she was trying to look at different themes. She did not click “update blog,” she was just changing the look and previewing to see what it would look like. She says she was abruptly logged off from the site. Then she could no longer log into the dashboard. We tried to change the password (a reset link was sent to my boss’s email, and she reset the password). We still cannot log in with the new reset password.

    In addition, when anyone visits the website, the following 500 Internal Service Error message appears: “The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, [email protected] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”

    We don’t have any downloaded version of this website or WordPress software on the computer– the only place we’ve ever made updates and changes is through the dashboard while logged in as an admin.

    I’ve looked through the forums and have to be honest, I don’t understand most of the offline procedures that I could do to possibly help our situation. However, there is a more knowledgeable person who works outside our department who might be willing to help us. Can anyone give a basic explanation of what we may need to do, and if our non website design minds can’t figure it out, hopefully we can show it to this other person to help us.

    Also, I was most hopeful that someone from WordPress could simply restore our settings by reverting everything back to whatever settings we had 24 hours before this post. Is that at all possible? Any help is appreciated.

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  • Sounds like your co-worker activated a different theme or a new plugin. Try:
    – switching to the Twenty Eleven theme by renaming your current theme’s folder in wp-content/themes and adding “-old” to the end of the folder name using FTP or whatever file management application your host provides.

    – resetting the plugins folder by FTP or phpMyAdmin.

    Once you have access again, I’d suggest quietly downgrading your co-worker’s login to Editor status to stop this happening again.

    Thread Starter gcwise.librarian

    (@gcwiselibrarian)

    I appreciate your response– I’ll show this to someone outside our department who may be able to help us do this.

    I could have just as easily made the mistake that my co-worker did… honestly, we’re just not web design/HTML savvy. I wouldn’t think that simply previewing a different/new theme would lock us out from our administrative dashboard and make the site unviewable. I think it would be better for us to have a tumblelog as a website to make it more foolproof. I don’t even know how to do what you suggested in order to fix it (but still so appreciative, because again, we’ll defer to someone who knows more and will hopefully help us).

    Any other tips are helpful for us hopelessly hopeless!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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