Installation Horror Story

  • Help! I need help undoing a ‘rogue’ installation – a problem I inadvertently caused on another user’s website. I posted this previously on the ‘Help & Troubleshooting’ forum, but received NO REPLIES.

    It was a very strange thing that happened. I received an email from a colleague who provided a link to a mutual acquaintence’s website. I clicked on the link in her message and was exploring the website, eventually clicking on a ‘Leadership Retreats’ heading. To my surprise, the WordPress login screen came up, followed by an invitation to update WordPress, which I had recently installed on my own machine. I went ahead and logged in and updated what I thought was MY WordPress information in the setup screen. Then, to my even greater surprise, I saw a message saying that I had successfully created a WordPress blog on this other person’s website (www.leadingartfully.com)! When I entered that address in my browser, it loaded a copy of a blog called ‘Healthy Futures.’

    To try to undo the problem, I went back into the WordPress setup information and changed all of the web addresses to redirect it to my own website. I thought this would disconnect this ‘rogue blog’ from the other person’s site, but it appears it did not (I’ve informed him and he’s asked his Webmaster to fix the problem at his end.) But, I see that an artefact of that ‘rogue’ blog still comes up when I surf to his website. The other problem is that I am no longer able to get to the WordPress setup screen to try to delete the rogue. Instead, most of the links just load my website.

    The other person has now fixed his website, and I can have my own web designer blow away the blog link that has attached itself to mine. So the remaining problem is to find out how to get into the setup info at WordPress to be able to set my blog up properly.

    Any ideas?

    Peter O’Donnell

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • govpatel

    (@govpatel)

    You should never ever login from someone else website as looks like once you logged in from their website the script went to work and hacked your wordpress.

    From what I gathered from your post, it looks like you just want to have a clean WP install, right?

    I would just blow it out (delete the files) via FTP or host control panel and do a complete reinstall from scratch.

    datasoftict

    (@datasoftict)

    As well as deleting the files, check both sets of data. You shouild be able to delete the wp_ tables off the MySQL database.

    Check your DB as well.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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