Editing Instruction Section Breaks Website

Hey @locatejp,

thanks for letting me know!

That should definitely not happen ??
Can you explain that a bit further to me?

Where did you edit the instruction? Within the settings?
Or within the page directly?
Do you have an example text for me that you’ve added (maybe you added HTML to it? Or something else besides text?)

Happy to dive in and fix that issue ASAP!

Cheers,
Patrick

Hi Patrick-

Thank you for your prompt response. We are using Version 4.2.1. The steps I took were:

• Navigate to the page in the WordPress dashboard editor
• Find the Passster widget on the right hand side
• Click the radio button to Overwrite defaults
• Change the Headline (that worked)
• Change the Instruction (at some point in here something failed). The text I was adding did not have any HTML or tags, it was just normal text. Example- “Use the password sent to you via email in the box below”
• Click Update for the page
• The website crashed

I don’t really want to mess with it more as I don’t want my website to crash again. I duplicated this result twice. I updated the Placeholder afterwards and it did not crash the site. I’m happy to do whatever else I can to help troubleshoot this issue.

Hey @locatejp,

thanks for the detailed explanation!

I tried to replicate the issue, but I couldn’t.
I can change the instruction text and save the page/post without issues.

I also tested if it is specific to the Block Editor / Classic Editor, but both produced the same result.

So it might be a problem in combination with another plugin.

Not sure if you have enabled it, but maybe you have the WP debug log that has recorded the exact issue?

Cheers,
Patrick

Hey Patrick, I had a feeling that reproducing the error was going to be challenging. Editing that section seemed like an unlikely reason to make the website crash, but so far it has proven to be consistent. As you suggested, it could be the result of interplay between two plugins, or some setting that we have enabled.

I enabled the debugging. There were other errors when I made sure the logging was working correctly. I’m going to put my fingers in my ears on those errors for now and deal with them later.

When the website crashes, it comes up quickly, so for the better of the community I’m going to take the same actions again and see if it gives us some workable logs.

Instruction was blank (using default text) so I added in the string “Use the password provided to you via email.”. I noticed a banner at the top that appeared that said “Connection lost.?Saving has been disabled until you are reconnected.?This post is being backed up in your browser, just in case.” The update button was not available, neither was the Preview button. I opened up a new tab for the website and it showed a crashed site. Message: This site can’t be reached boomerangtransport.net unexpectedly closed the connection.

I went into my hosting firewall and cleared the cache and reset the connection so that no users would see it go down (we are using CDN caching).

The logs don’t give us a lot to go on. There are 2 messages that show up over and over again, and then one new one that showed up right around the time that this action crashed the site. Here they are:

[21-Jul-2023 18:30:50 UTC] PHP Deprecated:  Function add_custom_background is <strong>deprecated</strong> since version 3.4.0! Use add_theme_support( 'custom-background', $args ) instead. in /home/XXX/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 5413
[21-Jul-2023 18:30:50 UTC] PHP Deprecated:  Function add_custom_image_header is <strong>deprecated</strong> since version 3.4.0! Use add_theme_support( 'custom-header', $args ) instead. in /home/XXX/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 5413
[21-Jul-2023 18:30:50 UTC] PHP Notice:  Only variables should be assigned by reference in /home/XXX/public_html/wp-content/plugins/exclude-pages/exclude_pages.php on line 92

So, it looks like this could be an issue with the exclude_pages even though it appears to be the use of your plugin that triggers it. The first two messages are the ones that just repeat over and over again and don’t seem to crash the site.

I hope this is helpful. I also hope that it identifies a way to improve the app to reduce cross plugin issues. Do you have any suggestions as to how we should proceed? Thank you