My experience on that “Critical error” message so common these days

Good to know @d0ugparker. So you say that when troubleshooting, a good first step is to just try again. And as a second step consider that a combination of multiple plugins (more than two) can cause the problem.

How would you go about testing for a combination of multiple plugins causing an issue? If I have say 10 plugins, I tend to switch all of them off, and then re-enable them one by one to see which one causes an issue.

Would you test all possible combinations?

This (and all the stuff that follows this, literally and figuratively) could easily sound über-snarky if I didn’t take the time to address its potential snarky-sounding-ness, but it’s not a quick fix; not a quick answer. Even though we’re conditioned to think and believe that every solution can be quickly fixed, and quickly answered, that’s part of my answer, which is but part of the lesson that I think needs to be one of its take aways. It’s the point (and points) I’m trying to make. *sigh* “Explaining it through typing it” makes it so hard—talking makes it so easy: typing and texting is substandard communication.

If you look back to the OP, “Just think about how mental models will have to change to adjust to that truth if it’s found to be true!” I predicted that models need to change. Here I am helping you adjust yours. It is about thinking, but it’s thinking on different, what I call “dimensional levels,” different from what we’re used to. Bear with me.

“How we think” and “How we communicate” is the thing I’m suggesting needs and need attention, but I’m not on the radar yet, it hasn’t gained traction, so the point is likely to be dismissed *because* it’s so new. It’s how the phenomenon plays itself out.

Answer the Question, Claire!

To attempt a stab at answering the question, your suggested approach seems to make sense.

All off, then triplet identification and isolation, then a period for each triplet of a)?turning on and turning off as well as b)?running through different activation sequences (1,2,3, then 1,3,2, then 2,1,3, then 2,3,1, then 3,1,2, then 3,2,1) because with a pair, it’s like night and day, yes and no. Once the quantum leap is made to three plugins, however, not knowing how they interact deeply with each other, it’s no longer night and day, and suddenly there’s all sorts of sunrise and sunset periods… but not necessarily. It’s way more complicated.

It’s complicated, but at the same time, simple. My 60/60 Rule applies here: talking for 60 seconds does more and accomplishes more than 60 minutes of typing. I think I’ve been typing for about 30 minutes so far, and the conversation isn’t anywhere near through. (-;

If it seems like I’m not answering your question, that’s also how the phenomenon plays itself out. “I don’t know what I don’t know… until I do.” It’s hard to be in that spot, and worse yet, the old culture never had the awareness to help you overcome that, either, so we’re all doubly lacking the tools to get us past the thing we’re struggling to get past.

Respectfully submitted.

Regards.

I like your more philosophical approach to what would be a technical problem for most people; i.e. your website not working.

And I think if you extend your thinking of going beyond pairs of plugins, looking at trios of plugins, you could also start looking at sets of four, five, or more plugins.

Then if you also consider your theme and any custom code, you make a strong point for keeping your WordPress installation as simple as possible.

Keeping with just plugins, imagine a website with two plugins installed. If you want to consider all possible combinations that could cause a conflict, you have just 2 options; either plugin A or plugin B.

If you have three plugins installed, this already jumps to 6 options: A, or B, or C. Or AB, or AC, or BC.

With four plugins this becomes 14, with five it becomes 30, and so on. Ten plugins is quite normal I believe, which would give you over a thousand combinations.

Even if you stay with only pair and trios, ten plugins gives you 165 possible combinations of causes for conflict.

So then, going from the philosophical to the practical: who has the time and patience to go through all those combinations? With that in mind, I think it’s totally practical to try to find any conflict in single plugins, or maybe pairs of plugins, and stop there. It’s not ideal, but it is practical.

It’s tricky right? We want sophisticated, but somewhere along the way we forget the practical beauty of simplicity…

It makes a case for using AI to go into the breach and figure out what’s happening, what can be done, what needs to be done.

Individual developers, frankly, don’t care about other other developers’ code. That’s common sense. Every developer assumes, reasonably, that their plug-in is going to be the only plug-in used with WordPress—we know that’s not the case. However, no developer has 1) the time, 2) the money, or 3) the time and money, to exhaustively figure out how all plugins bump into all other plugins.

Assign AI the task of configuring different versions of WordPress, with different numbers of combinations of plugins. Then, let it chew on the data it creates. Let it amass its own database of which plug-in combinations are problem free, which ones are red flag combinations, which ones are yellow flag combinations—or—hot problems, warm problems, or cold problems. The labels can be anything we want. It can be percentages.

Let AI uncover and discover where the problems exist. Based on its swapping combinations of plugins in and out, determine whose plugins collide with whose other plugins. Simply advise the developers in the developers’ sphere where problems exist, and let them determine how best to handle whatever that next step (unknown as of yet) needs to be.

Amazingly, it seems to get us out of the problem and into the direction of the solution, or a solution. Time will tell.

I’m on mobile, so the formatting appears to be wanky

Adding “AI” to the tag set.