KNOWN ISSUE: Saving large files blocked by security rules

This issue is reported in one form or another several times per week. Symptoms usually involve meaningless error messages when clicking “Save”.

It’s a well documented problem that some hosting providers install security software that can block certain functions, including the sending of large postdata. This problem commonly affects WooCommerce translations because WooCommerce PO files are some of the largest (~800K and higher for some languages).

Poorly configured security software often produces irrelevant error pages when requests are blocked. A nonsensical error message indicates that a page from your theme (often a 404) has been rendered instead of Loco Translate’s Ajax response. It’s not possible for Loco Translate to know what this response means.

The only help available for this issue is in this FAQ. If you can’t get around the problem, ask your hosting provider to solve it. Lazy support desks will blame the plugin and send you back here, but this doesn’t alter my position on the level of help available.

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Future versions of Loco Translate may post PO files using a different method that will hopefully circumvent this problem, but for the time being the only solution is to modify your server configuration or security rules.

One option (for plugin improvement) is for the editor to post PO source text as a concrete file upload, instead of a regular postdata field. This is on the TODO list to experiment with.

If any such changes are made to the plugin, this topic will be updated.