Main dashboard window is blank, so I can’t fix corrupted site

Via FTP or your hosting control panel, try deleting the directory wp-content/plugins/wp-firewall

FTP into your site and go to wp-content > plugins and just rename it to plugins-off for the time being and then see if you can get back in. If so, go look at that plugins folder via FTP and see if you notice a plugin that might appear to be a firewall or any other that looks suspicious to you. Go ahead and rename those suspicious plugins.

Now rename back the plugins-off folders to plugins. See if you can still access the admin. If so, you need to figure out which of those plugins is causing the problem renaming each one back and test.

It’s rare but sometimes updating old version will fix itself. You might want manually download wordpress and upload at least the wp-admin and wp-includes folders.

Thanks very much for your help guys.

I tried to rename the plugins folder to plugins-off via my ftp (Cyberduck), but first of all I got an error message saying “SSH Error: Cannot rename plugins. No such file (SSH_FX_NO_SUCH_FILE: A reference was made to a file which does not exist.).”, and now the plugins folder is showing as empty, whereas before I tried to rename it there were 7 or 8 sub-folders (none of them named wp-firewall or anything else obviously dodgy looking).

Then I tried my hosting control panel (Gandi), but when I try to navigate to the htdocs folder for the site it redirects to the same URL as the domain itself (https://2jsfreshmarket.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-firewall/1/tds.php), and that page now shows the following message:

“Your IP address has been automatically flagged as abusive. You are currently banned from viewing this site. To remove the ban, please visit the un-ban page.”

So unfortunately I’m still stuck…

I should add that the main dashboard window in my WordPress back-end is still blank. Except for one new thing – when I select ‘Plugins’ and then ‘Editor’ from the left-hand menu I get text in the main window saying “There are no plugins installed on this site.”. No other menu items reveal anything in the main window.

If your IP has been flagged as abusive then I would look into that to see why that is. You may be experiencing issues that has nothing to do with WordPress. I am not familiar with your host provider but I would talk to them.

I’ve got a feeling that my IP hasn’t actually been flagged as abusive. I reckon that’s some sort of phishing scam or similar, to get me to give out my details in order to remove the ‘ban’. I have various other WordPress sites and none of the others are having any issues, and the URL for the message about the abusive IP appears as a sub-page of the website of a produce company in Montana… (I wrote to the produce company to let them know somebody is using their site for evil doings, but no response back yet…)

I did contact the support guys at my host provider, and they say this is a WordPress issue and therefore out of their control.

I did contact the support guys at my host provider, and they say this is a WordPress issue and therefore out of their control.

Once this is sorted, time to find a new host who doesn’t walk away from customers.

What plugins do you see? Do you see anything in wp-content/mu-plugins?

To be fair they’re generally pretty good. They did look into it for me, and they helped me fix some other issues, but they say this is a problem with my WordPress database, so it isn’t something they can solve…

I don’t see any plugins anymore. Not since I tried to re-name the folder. Via ftp the folder is empty, and in the WP dashboard I get the text telling me there are no plugins installed. Before I tried to re-name the folder there were several plugins in it, all of which I recognised as ones I’ve been using, nothing that looked suspicious.

I don’t see anything called mu-plugins under wp-content.